Shenzhen-based 3D printer maker Creality has filed an Application Proof with the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (HKEX) for a main board listing, its third attempt to go public.
If the listing proceeds, the company would be the first consumer 3D printing firm to trade in Hong Kong. According to a March 2026 prospectus, Chinese investment bank China International Capital Corporation (CICC) is acting as sole sponsor.
The timing is a bit high-stakes. Creality remains the largest consumer 3D printer maker in the world by cumulative shipments, having sold 4.4 million units between 2020 and 2024. But that lead is historical.
In 2024, rival Bambu Lab shipped 1.2 million printers to Creality’s roughly 700,000, claiming a 29% share of annual shipments against Creality’s 16.9%. The IPO is, in part, a bid to raise capital while the company still holds enough credibility to do so.
How Bambu Lab Shifted the Basis of Competition
To understand how Creality arrived here, it helps to know how it rose. Its Ender series, launched in 2017, made desktop 3D printing affordable for a generation of hobbyists who could not previously justify the cost. Price and manufacturing scale carried the company to a 27.9% cumulative market share.
That was enough, until Bambu Lab launched the X1 in 2022 and changed what buyers expected. Speed, automation, multicolour printing, and polished software became the new benchmarks. By the time Creality responded with its K1 series in May 2023, it was already playing catch-up.
That competitive lag runs through the financials. Overall revenue grew strongly, from RMB 1.35 billion in 2022 to RMB 3.13 billion in 2025. But within that, printer revenue rose just 0.9% in 2024, and the growth that did occur came from higher prices rather than more units sold.
According to 36Kr, the average selling price climbed from RMB 1,306 to RMB 2,404 between 2022 and 2025, while unit sales fell from 842,000 to 742,000. A company selling fewer products at higher prices is not gaining ground; it is managing a retreat.
Creality’s response has been to spend its way back into contention, and the cost is showing. R&D spending more than doubled to RMB 222 million in 2025. Marketing costs rose ninefold to RMB 270 million as the company pushed into direct online sales, which grew from 14% of revenue in 2022 to 49% in 2025.
The selling expense ratio climbed from 8.1% to 18.2%. Gross margins held at around 31%, but the bottom line did not. The company swung to a net loss of RMB 182.4 million in 2025, from a profit of RMB 88.7 million the year before, and operating cash flow turned negative.
| Revenue in Thousands (RMB/USD) | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 |
| Total RMB | 1,346,419 | 1,882,862 | 2,288,328 | 3,127,040 |
| Total USD | 192,302 | 268,920 | 326,830 | 446,619 |
The Platform Story and the Pressures Behind It
That is where the platform story becomes important. Creality operates Creality Cloud, an online community with 5.7 million registered users, and in August 2025 launched Nexbie, an e-commerce platform for 3D printed products, backed in part by a tie-up with Tencent’s Hunyuan3D artificial intelligence tools.
A recurring revenue model built on software, content, and consumables would reduce the company’s dependence on one-off hardware sales and, in theory, justify a higher valuation. In practice, all products on Nexbie are sold by Creality itself. At the time of reporting, it is a storefront, not yet a marketplace.
Founder and chief executive Jack Chen has framed the IPO pitch around that longer horizon rather than near-term performance. He has likened desktop 3D printing to personal computing decades ago, arguing that most potential users have still never touched the technology.
“What they really care [about] is to see the sustainability growth of this market,” he said of investors, “not just to invest in this industry and then three or five years later there will be no growth.”
The market projections offer some support for that view. CICC estimates the global consumer 3D printing market will grow from $4.1 billion in 2024 to $16.9 billion by 2029. Whether Creality is well-placed to capture that growth is a harder question.
Bambu Lab is not the only new entrant; Anker and Dreame are also moving in. With 57.3% of 2025 revenue coming from North America and Europe, tariff risk is real. And Nexbie, for all its potential, has yet to prove itself as anything more than a first-party shop.
The offer price remains redacted. Creality’s last private valuation, set in its 2021 funding round, was approximately $556 million. Whether it can exceed that figure will depend on how much weight investors give to the platform story vs. the pressures already visible in the numbers.
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Featured image shows the Creality Logo on a building. Image via Creality.
