CECIMO, the European Association of Manufacturing Technologies, has officially unveiled AM-Europe, a dedicated continental platform designed to consolidate and amplify the additive manufacturing (AM) sector’s presence across Europe. The initiative marks a deliberate structural shift, transforming CECIMO’s longstanding but internally-focused AM activities into an outward-facing, inclusive ecosystem with a distinct European identity.
Rather than a new organisation built from scratch, AM-Europe is best understood as the next stage in CECIMO’s multi-decade engagement with additive manufacturing. The association has long worked alongside industry players, research bodies, and EU policymakers to establish AM as a cornerstone of Europe’s industrial strategy. AM-Europe channels that accumulated experience into a more coordinated, openly participatory structure.
A Founding Coalition and an Open Invitation
The platform has been established by a founding group drawn from across the European AM landscape: UCIMU (Italy), AITA3D, ADDIMAT (Spain), FMTI, SWISSMEM (Switzerland), and AMUK (United Kingdom). These organisations collectively represent machine builders, technology developers, and national manufacturing associations, providing AM-Europe with a geographically and technically diverse starting base.
With the formal launch, AM-Europe is now extending membership to a broader range of actors, national associations, research institutions, and competence centres are all invited to participate. The goal is to move European AM coordination beyond bilateral relationships and toward a structured, continent-wide dialogue capable of speaking with a unified voice in Brussels and beyond.
Strategic Priorities in a New Policy Landscape
The timing of AM-Europe’s launch is deliberate. Additive manufacturing is increasingly on the radar of European policymakers as a technology that can support industrial flexibility, reduce supply chain dependencies, and strengthen capabilities in sectors with strategic importance, among them defence, aerospace, energy, and healthcare.
AM-Europe’s agenda maps directly onto these priorities. Its planned activities span policy advocacy, standardisation efforts, market intelligence, skills development, and structured engagement with EU institutions. The platform also commits to advancing the goals outlined in the Manifesto for a Competitive European Additive Manufacturing Sector, which frames Europe’s ambition to become a global leader in AM technology deployment.
“From an industrial perspective, additive manufacturing has become a strategic technology for Europe’s competitiveness, resilience and capacity to innovate. Through AM-Europe, we want to create a stronger and more coordinated European platform that brings together the AM ecosystem, supports closer dialogue with policymakers, and helps ensure that companies have the right framework conditions to develop, invest and scale. Europe has the expertise and industrial base to lead in additive manufacturing, let’s work together within AM-Europe to make this happen,” said Virgilio García, Chairman of AM-Europe.
From Strategy to Structure: Europe’s Long Road to AM Coordination
The launch of AM-Europe does not emerge in a vacuum. It is the product of years of incremental institution-building that exposed a persistent gap: Europe’s additive manufacturing expertise has long been strong nationally but fragmented continentally. When CECIMO first outlined its continental AM strategy, its Director General was already clear that succeeding in the global race to industrialise additive manufacturing was essential for Europe to hold its ground in advanced manufacturing. What followed was a series of targeted but disparate efforts, standards work, advocacy, research partnerships, that collectively pointed toward the need for a unified platform rather than a loose coalition of national actors.
That trajectory is now bearing fruit beyond Europe’s borders. ASTM International and AM-Europe have entered a Memorandum of Understanding to coordinate standards, certification, and workforce training across continents, a signal that a coherent European platform carries transatlantic weight in ways that fragmented national efforts could not.
The same approach is playing out elsewhere on the continent. The Nordic Additive Manufacturing Alliance (NAMA) recently brought Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark together under a single cooperative framework for the first time, on the premise that national expertise alone cannot generate the interoperability, scale, or policy influence that today’s industrial challenges demand. AM-Europe follows that same reasoning at a continental level: not to replace national strength, but to ensure it adds up to something greater than the sum of its parts.
3D Printing Industry is inviting speakers for its 2026 Additive Manufacturing Applications (AMA) series, covering Energy, Healthcare, Automotive and Mobility, Aerospace, Space and Defense, and Software. Each online event focuses on real production deployments, qualification, and supply chain integration. Practitioners interested in contributing can complete the call for speakers form here.
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Featured image shows CECIMO representing Europe’s manufacturing technology sector before the European Commission. Photo via CECIMO.
