Belgium 3D Printing Company Materialise Acquires Poland’s Leading Prototyping Firm, e-Prototypy

Over the past few months we have seen several significant mergers and acquisitions take place within the 3D printing industry. Today comes yet another rather important acquisition.

Materialise, a Belgium based company that has been playing a large role in 3D printing for the past 24 years, has announced that they have acquired a Polish prototyping company named e-Prototypy.

“With the acquisition of e-Prototypy, Materialise shows its commitment to further invest in the east-European market”, explained Bart Van Der Schueren, Vice President Industrial Production at Materialise. “Thanks to the acquisition, Polish customers will be gaining access to the vast production capacity of Materialise. Furthermore, current Materialise customers will benefit from access to the scanning and reverse engineering services of e-Prototypy.”

It seems as though this is a mutually beneficial acquisition.  Materialise is known for having the largest capacity of 3D printing equipment in all of Europe. They also provide related software solutions. Their customers include large companies in the automotive industry, as well as consumer electronics and consumables sectors.  They also deliver products to hospitals, research institutes, as well as individuals who wish to print their own 3D designs.

e-Prototypy, on the other hand, specializes in producing functional prototypes using 3D scanning and printing. This makes the entire prototyping process much more affordable than with the traditional molding process.  They offer a “Rapid Prototyping” service using several different 3D printing methods.  These methods include SLS (laser sintering), FDM (filament printing), POLYJET, and DMLS.  Their printing chambers are huge in comparison to what most 3D printing enthusiasts are used to seeing (FDM – 406x356x406mm & SLS – 700x380x580mm).

Grzegorz Sworobowicz, vice-CEO and co-founder of e-Prototypy, had the following to say:

“We see a lot of opportunities for growth in the Polish market and by joining Materialise, the e-Prototypy team looks forward to helping even more people in the region realize the benefits of the services and solutions we have to offer, As part of Materialise, our customers will be given access to even better service with a larger range of 3D Printing technologies and they can benefit from Materialise’s 23 years of experience in this industry.”

This surely isn’t the last acquisition we will see this year in the 3D printing/scanning industry. Discuss this article and the ramifications of this acquisition at: http://3dprintboard.com/showthread.php?1654-Belgium-3D-Printing-Company-Materialise-Acquires-e-Prototypy