For over 10 years, I ran 3D printing-based businesses in Poland. It’s a tough market for additive manufacturing (AM). The country is very wealthy and receptive when it comes to traditional manufacturing technologies, but very frugal and hesitant when it comes to adopting new solutions like 3D printing. Everything that was quickly implemented in the U.S. or Western Europe would take several years to catch on in Poland. Maybe it was due to our deeply rooted conservatism. “Why change something that works?” I don’t know.
Anyway, for most of those 10 years, I felt like I was doing everything wrong because I wasn’t achieving results proportional to the effort I was putting in. I should have been making millions by then, but I was still counting everything in thousands. I felt like an utter failure. I was disappointed in myself. I wondered how I could walk away from it all.
But the closer I got to 10 years in this career, the more I began to see things differently. Setting aside the issue of Poland, I looked at companies worldwide.
First, all of the bright stars of consumer 3D printing suddenly dimmed. Solidoodle, M3D, Printrbot, NewMatter—all gone. Cubify by 3D Systems—gone. MakerBot—a massive identity crisis that ended with a miserable merger with Ultimaker.
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Then, the even-brighter stars of industrial 3D printing—erm, Additive Manufacturing—also started to fade. Shapeways, Fast Radius, Smile Direct Club—all gone. EnvisionTEC—sold to Desktop Metal. Desktop Metal, Essentium, Markforged, Velo3D—hard struggles, vital remains. 3D Systems, Stratasys—oh wow… even them?
Suddenly, I realized that compared to all of them, I wasn’t doing as badly as I thought. True, I never operated with the kind of money those companies had, but I never lost (burned) that kind of cash either. I didn’t rack up those kinds of debts. Damn, for a really large majority of the time, I sustained myself on what I earned. Unlike all of them, I had years when I was profitable.
And when I finally completed the full 10 years and entered my 11th year of business, I started asking myself new questions.
What if?
What if it’s not the fault of the companies, but the market they operate in?
What if selling 3D printers is like selling ice cream in winter? Or rain boots in the desert? You know, there’s always going to be some customer, but it’s hard to become a billionaire in that kind of business.
What if the 3D printing market is just small, and the aspirations of the companies operating in it are too big?
What if everyone is doing everything right, but the results they want to achieve are impossible to attain?
And that’s how my three laws of the AM market were born. At first glance, they seem very simple—almost obvious and trivial, but I assumed:
If a law in any field is convoluted and hard to understand, it means someone’s pulling a scam.
So, mine are easy, simple, and downright transparent.
Introduction
Let’s start by distinguishing three things that are often perceived as one and the same:
- 3D printing technology – the manufacturing method, along with its associated hardware, software, and materials.
- Users of 3D printing technology – companies and individuals who use 3D printing technology to execute their own projects, not related to 3D printing itself.
- Companies in the 3D printing industry – entities that manufacture or supply 3D printers, materials, and software, as well as those that provide 3D printing services to other companies and individuals.
Although they are interdependent, in a market context, we must view them separately. History shows that a successful implementation of 3D printing in another industrial sector can significantly impact the development of that sector, but it doesn’t necessarily translate to the growth of the 3D printing sector itself.
A great example is the technology developed by voxeljet. It had a huge impact on the development of casting in the automotive industry (giga-casting), but this did not translate into a proportional growth of voxeljet itself. In short, “one 3D printer” proved to be so effective that it significantly advanced a particular industrial sector but did not generate a demand for additional 3D printers.
What’s more, paradoxically, the greater the benefits the foundry industry had from voxeljet 3D printers, the worse voxeljet was in. Absurd, but that’s how it was.
As for end-users, they invest in AM for various reasons:
- Quality
- Availability
- Price (implementation cost)
- Operating cost (materials + consumables)
- Marketing
- Interaction with the sales team (quality of sales)
- Keeping up with partner companies and competitors
- The possibility of obtaining independent financing for the purchase of technology.
The end-user may purchase a 3D printer in a particular technology for reasons completely disconnected from its actual functionality or application in their production environment.
A real-world example:
- A company prints parts on a desktop-grade FDM/FFF 3D printer and is very satisfied with them.
- The firm learns about HP’s Multi Jet Fusion (MJF) technology and eventually begin to desire it even though their actual need for parts could be met with much cheaper and smaller solutions like the Formlabs Fuse or Sinterit Lisa.
- They obtain additional funding from government sources (e.g., EU funding) and use it to purchase MJF technology.
- After implementation, they either do not use it at all or use it very sparingly due to higher operating costs compared to desktop FDM/FFF 3D printers, which were sufficient for them from the beginning.
An opposite example:
- A company wants to print large objects (50 cm XYZ) from high-performance plastics.
- To achieve this, they need to purchase an expensive FDM/FFF machine.
- Due to budget constraints or simple lack of awareness, they buy a cheap, semi-professional 3D printer with a large build area, which never meets their technological expectations.
- The 3D printer fails, the company is deeply disappointed with the technology and the industry, and ultimately abandons AM.
Therefore, the increase in sales of 3D printers of a given type may not have any justified or logical connection with the specificity and features of the technology itself. Especially in the long term.
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Regarding manufacturers and suppliers of 3D printers/materials or software:
- One company may achieve spectacular and media-successful advancements in a particular additive technology, but this may not translate into business growth; as a result, it may be seen as important in the hierarchy due to its technological achievements but will be bankrupt in a business context.
- Another company, on the other hand, may thrive by “feeding off” the solutions of the first company but will achieve much greater business success by offering simplified or imperfect versions of the first company’s products at much lower prices; thus, it will be less respected within the industry but profitable.
In summary, these three things: 3D printing technology, 3D printer users, and 3D solution providers, must be viewed independently. They may be—but are not necessarily—interconnected.
In the next article in this series, I will present the laws with their basic definitions, and later, provide proofs and explanations for these laws.
Images courtesy of the author.