Nikon Advanced Manufacturing Has a Plan: CEO Hamid Zarringhalam on the Company’s Outlook for Metal 3D Printing in The US

As 2024 nears its end and we barrel right into the middle of the decade, the additive manufacturing (AM) industry still finds itself lacking direction. If there’s one thing the AM industry needs right now — especially in the West — it’s strategic vision.

Notably, it’s a company with Japanese roots that is currently in one of the best positions to help guide the Western AM industry along the right path forward. Nikon Advanced Manufacturing is simultaneously a perfect embodiment of the AM industry’s trajectory in the 2020s, as well as a completely unique example of how the industry needs to operate in order to continue evolving.

The company’s CEO, Hamid Zarringhalam, has spent virtually his entire career helping Nikon follow through on implementing its broad corporate strategy, working in the conglomerate’s semiconductor manufacturing equipment division for three decades. Semiconductor equipment is an industry perpetually moving into the future, with its personnel doing the grunt work necessary for keeping Moore’s Law alive.

Among the many useful parallels Zarringhalam sees between manufacturing semiconductor equipment and the AM industry, perhaps the most relevant one for 2025 and beyond is the urgency to scale effectively:

“About 10 years ago, when Industry 4.0 was first catching on, Nikon started to look at what we could do with digital manufacturing, and AM quickly became one of our main areas of interest there,” Zarringhalam began. “We started in the area of DED [directed energy deposition] in our skunkworks, and some of those products that we ended up commercializing are still here, like the Lasermeister, for instance.

“A bit later on, as we started preparing our strategy for 2030 at the corporate level, we knew that we needed to scale AM more rapidly. We realized that making more investments in small emerging companies would be a key way to accelerate the expansion of our AM footprint and scale. So we made an investment into what was then called Morf3D, a service bureau recently reorganized into Nikon AM Synergy. As part of that acquisition, we started building a 90,000 square foot facility in Long Beach, the Nikon AM Technology Center that we opened in August 2024.”

Prior to Nikon’s acquisition of Morf3D, the latter had already received investments from companies including Boeing, while also serving other customers in the aerospace and defense markets like Honeywell and Collins Aerospace. Following the Morf3D deal, Nikon continued to emphasize those markets with its purchase of SLM Solutions (now Nikon SLM Solutions):

“Even before the intensification of global conflicts over the last couple of years, we saw that defense was the fastest growing adopter of PBF,” explained Zarringhalam. “Defense manufacturers saw the gaps that metal AM can help close in the defense industrial base, a lesson that I think is still in the process of spreading more widely. SLM’s technology — large format, many high-powered lasers — provides a roadmap that caters specifically to the need to close those gaps.

“Once we acquired SLM, then, the combination of that and our plans for the secure facility in Long Beach allowed us to double down on our strategy to scale metal AM for the defense industrial base. At the same time, I’m still relatively new to aerospace and defense, which made it crucial to bring in some experts.

“Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, joined us as a strategic advisor this summer, and that’s certainly been very helpful as we navigate this path we’re on. We’ve also made it a priority for Nikon SLM Solutions to start manufacturing the NXG XII 600 in the US.”

That last point could become increasingly critical to the US AM industry’s future. China has been imposing a growing number of export controls on AM technologies over the last several years, including export controls specifically related to the aerospace sector this summer. Meanwhile, in September, the US announced its own export controls on metal AM technologies. Additionally, the Biden administration announced that it would be exploring ways to more tightly regulate the production of 3D printed guns.

Zarringhalam specifically praised the export controls, calling them “long overdue”. He also referenced the recent case of exploding electronic devices in Lebanon as a wake-up call regarding how much work still needs to be done on supply chain security, despite Western governments’ increasing focus on the issue so far this decade:

“It’s not only the US, but more broadly, the US and its allies that have to work together to address the problem,” Zarringhalam said. “If you look at where Nikon’s geographical presence is in terms of its AM operations, it’s the US and two extremely close allies, Germany and Japan. And then beyond the geographical angle, there are cybersecurity aspects involved in preventing the occurrence of situations like the exploding pagers and walkie-talkies in the Middle East.

“That’s not to suggest that anything like that could happen here — rather, it sheds light on the potential for any supply chain vulnerabilities that can pop up when you’re dependent on fragmented, opaque manufacturing networks, especially when those are subject to control by adversarial governments. One small blindspot can end up crippling nationally critical infrastructure.

“It’s not just important, then, to have as many components as possible produced either onshore or within the territory of an ally, but also to ensure to the extent that you’re able to that the relevant supply chains are protected from potential threats. Our understanding of that, and the protocols we have in place to support that objective, are major factors that make us well-positioned to serve the defense industrial base.”

From the broadest perspective, AM’s potential strategic significance — the aspect that makes it so appealing to the defense industrial base — is another clear parallel that it shares with the semiconductor sector. Global semiconductor production, however, happens at a scale that is currently  unimaginable for the AM industry. Again, this is why learning how to accelerate and standardize scaling is arguably the most important task the AM industry has on its plate at the current juncture:

“The adoption rates are still very low,” the CEO told me. “In terms of all the parts that are good candidates for AM, still only two percent of those are being produced. The bright side of that is it means that there’s still so much room for the industry to grow, but to do that we need to encourage an environment of innovation, and we also need the industry to get positive momentum behind it. There needs to be some kind of initiative, perhaps a public-private collaboration, that cultivates a common mindset behind de-risking investments that can accelerate adoption, innovation, and even the manufacturing processes themselves.

“If we look back for historical parallels, the Cold War was won because of the overwhelming technological and manufacturing superiority of the US. We simply had more sophisticated, precision-guided weaponry, which served as the most effective deterrent to our adversary. So that’s the kind of scale we need to return to. The nature of deterrence and the theaters may have changed, but we still need all of the capabilities represented by the most advanced manufacturing  technologies. And the US and its allies need to be able to deploy those capabilities at the largest possible scale for the good of the world order.”

Maybe realizing just how ambitious a benchmark he’d set for himself — and realizing that it’s no less necessary, for all its boldness — Zarringhalam let out a brief chuckle, before turning serious once again: “So, what we’re doing here is actually very important.”

To put in perspective precisely how important, the thirty-year veteran of the semiconductor sector concluded, “These technologies need to be adopted much more urgently at this point, even, than the latest generation of semiconductors.”  If the rest of the AM industry starts to think like Nikon Advanced Manufacturing, that just might be possible.

Images courtesy of Nikon Advanced Manufacturing