New Manifesto Pushes for Unified European AM Strategy

Brussels-headquartered trade organization the European Association of Manufacturing Technologies (CECIMO) has issued a brief paper entitled “Manifesto for a Competitive European Additive Manufacturing [AM] Sector”, outlining what the group considers to be the most general strategic considerations involved in building the future of the European AM industry. The plan was launched with the endorsement of ten different AM-dedicated trade groups from around Europe, including AMUK and Spain’s ADDIMAT.

Beyond the contents of the document itself, the manifesto also serves the purpose of launching AM-Europe, described by CECIMO as “[a platform that aims to] provide a single, united voice for the [AM] industry at the European level”. While there is little information thus far as to what that platform will entail, one of the recommendations in the document does call for “a dedicated European AM entity” that will help “overcome barriers in AM”.

Specifically, CECIMO recommends that AM-Europe should take the form of a public-private partnership, a theme that runs throughout most of the manifesto’s focal points. Other key angles covered in the text’s recommendations seek to capitalize on what other similar organizations around the world have discovered throughout the last decade of the AM industry’s evolution:

For instance, the manifesto recommends that major European industrial stakeholders “Include AM among the industry critical for emergency response capabilities”, suggesting that they, “Invest in AM to enhance emergency response capabilities, ensuring rapid production of critical components during crises.”

As the document then explains, “By establishing a network of AM facilities across Member States, the EU can, in different cases, leverage AM to address supply chain disruptions and produce essential parts on demand, thereby reducing dependence on external suppliers. This can help boost industrial resilience and competitiveness and ensure that critical infrastructure and healthcare systems remain operational during emergencies.”

I love initiatives like this one, and the EU is clearly a great fit in terms of its potential as an environment within which the AM industry can become better organized. AM-Europe should definitely benefit from the participation of organizations like ADDIMAT, which, over the last ten years, has already built in Spain what CECIMO seems to be attempting to build for Europe as a whole.

It’s no surprise to see that emergency response and reshoring are key features of the plan thus far, reinforcing what AM companies around the world, including the AM industries of individual European nations, have been most focused on throughout the first half of the 2020s. It is already overwhelmingly obvious, as the world starts to approach the end of this decade, that emergency response and reshoring should only grow all the more relevant with the passage of time.

Echoing the dynamics generally prevailing in the EU economy, the most interesting aspect to observe about AM-Europe going forward will be the organization’s attempts to navigate the awkward position of being wedged between the U.S. and Chinese economies. In that vein, this first step of trying to structure all the different European AM ecosystems into one coherent context is the wisest thing that anyone could do: the EU can only hope to build something truly new by successfully uniting all of its disparate members around a common objective. Historically, that’s been a seemingly impossible task, but the manageable size of the AM industry gives AM-Europe a realistic chance of succeeding where others have failed.