The 3D printing market is undergoing a fundamental transformation. The era of enthusiasts tuning equipment in garages is a thing of the past. Today, additive technologies (AT) are becoming a tool for the CFO and shop floor manager.
Infrastructural shift: CAPEX instead of a toy
The main marker of the maturation of the market is the change in the portrait of the buyer. If two years ago the main sales drivers were private enthusiastic engineers, today up to 60% of the audience are women 30-35 years old who use a printer for household tasks. When a person becomes interested in technology who does not want to understand the extruder device, but simply needs to print an organizer or a toy for a child, it is then that the technology becomes widespread.
This consumer demand has formed a new quality standard that business can no longer ignore. For an enterprise, downtime is measured by money and missed deadlines. Therefore, the corporate segment moved from the category of R&D experiments to the direct capital expenditures (CAPEX) zone. Buying a printer is now justified by prosaic things: how many hours the machine really works, how repeatable is the result and how much money is saved compared to traditional production. Technology does not become industrial when it begins to be called industrial, but then, when it becomes clear to the CFO why money was allocated for it in the budget.
Rate of iteration economics vs. part price
For large businesses, the introduction of AT often looks paradoxical. Giants like AvtoVAZ buy desktop printers not to print body elements, but to create conductors for drilling, protective covers or special handles for workplaces. This is a layer of products that are needed in single copies right now.
The payback point of your own printer lies not in the volume of production, but in the cost of the error. Traditional manufacturing requires freezing the construction before ordering the mold. Additive technologies make it possible to make mistakes cheaply. The most expensive part is not always the one that is expensive to produce. Sometimes it’s a detail that has to be awaited too long.
If an engineer needs high change rates, urgency and the ability to test multiple hypotheses in a day, their own fleet of printers benefits any outsourcing by radically shortening the feedback loop.
In small-scale production (batches of 500-1000 pieces), 3D printing also ceases to be exotic. It will not replace casting with circulations of one hundred thousand units with a stable design, but it will take away those tasks where the design is still changing or demand is unstable. The border of economic feasibility will move up thanks to the automation of farms.
New type of personnel and generative design
The main problem of the introduction of past years – the shortage of specialists – is gradually being solved by simplifying the machines themselves. The industry has gone Apple’s way: the user no longer needs to prove to the equipment that he is worthy of printing on it. Automatic calibration and control of the first layer turns from a competitive advantage to a hygienic minimum.
The profession of a 3D printing specialist rises to a higher level: it is not the ability to press the Print button that is appreciated, but an understanding of what exactly makes sense to print, what material, with what nuances and where 3D printing is generally economically justified.
The next stage of evolution is AI integration. Generative design will cease to be a niche for specialized teams. However, I am sure that the design engineer will not disappear anywhere. The neural network will begin to take away that part of the work that the engineer himself will gladly give it. But the value of fundamental knowledge will not go away. The more work you can delegate to the machine, the more important the person becomes, able to say where the neural network made a mistake.
Sovereignty without bigotry and environmental standards
The issue of localizing the production of critical components in Russia is considered pragmatically. Reproducing the entire chain of China-level electronics suppliers is economically meaningless. Technological sovereignty lies not in the ability to make each screw yourself, but in the ability to continue working if the usual supply channels disappear. Priority shall be given to selective localization of consumables, service base and spare parts.
As for regulation, the deeper additive technologies penetrate into real production, the more attention will be paid to the repeatability of the result, the characteristics of materials, certification and manufacturer responsibility. If a printed part becomes part of a car, industrial equipment or a system on which human safety depends, the requirements should be completely different.
Moreover, certain standards in the field of additive manufacturing and materials already exist. The next logical stage is for the requirements to gradually become not just a regulatory document, but a real element of industrial practice and procurement procedures.
Separately, I think the issue of traceability of materials will develop. When an enterprise buys raw materials for the production of a responsible part, it is important for it to understand not only what is written on the box PLA, PETG or PA, but what batch of material it used and what actual characteristics this batch had. Therefore, stricter certification, labeling, control of the origin of materials is a completely natural scenario for the maturation of the market.
For a mature business, standardization is often useful: it gradually removes from the market a situation when two completely different products are sold under the same name.
Environmental requirements (waste recycling, the share of secondary plastic) will become mandatory filters for guests a little later, after the industry solves the basic problem of filament stability. Two different manufacturers under the same label should cease to be perceived by the market as a lottery. Already on top of this, more serious environmental requirements will appear quite logically: the origin of raw materials, waste processing, the share of recycled material, and recycling conditions. Moreover, for state and large corporate procurement, this is a particularly logical scenario – standardization there is always faster than in the household segment.
The main change in the next five years, in my opinion, is a change in rhetoric. The market will increasingly discuss the very existence of 3D printing and increasingly treat it as a common, predictable and efficient production method.
By Vladimir Pleskevich, CEO of Skolkovo resident company 3D-OUTLET (Bambu Lab dealer in the CIS market)