I have been visiting China for more than a decade and have seen first-hand how its 3D printing industry has changed.
Alongside a tropical shirt suitable for Shenzhen in August, I packed a notebook full of preconceptions to put to the test as I returned to report at Formnext Asia Shenzhen.
China is still routinely described through a familiar collection of ideas: manufacturing at enormous scale, cheap products, copying, formidable hardware, weaker software, rapid development, bureaucracy and cities so large that journalists eventually give up and describe everything as enormous.
I was hoping to avoid the clichés.
They started winning before I reached the airport.
Online check-in for my flight did not work. Verification for WeChat payments was troublesome. A facial-recognition system repeatedly instructed me to stop covering my chin, apparently unable to comprehend the topiary that has been a near-permanent feature of my face for decades.
I wrote in my notebook that both failures seemed to lean into one of my preconceptions: China could build and operate hardware at extraordinary scale, while the software layer sometimes held the ecosystem back.
Nine days later, that conclusion would look both more convincing and considerably less useful.
Even the flight map was uncooperative. Somewhere around Stockholm our aircraft appeared to stop moving. I asked the cabin crew. This was met with some hand-waving. Eventually the plane sprang back into existence on the screen somewhere beyond Omsk. Most passengers appeared unconcerned.
Was I already doing it? Taking an entirely mundane technical failure and turning it into evidence about China? Possibly.
To help matters, the in-flight entertainment offered Pegasus 3, a film about Chinese rally drivers whose cars are sabotaged by a nefarious Spanish engineer.
I was trying not to think in stereotypes, but the journey was proving unhelpful.
Massive in Melbourne
Shenzhen in August is tropical. Humid, intensely green, occasionally pink, and capable of turning violently wet with little warning. Signs for APEC China 2026 were already everywhere.
On my first evening I found myself at a Futian bar, attempting to order through WeChat. Again, the app did not cooperate.
I ordered a Negroni manually. “Good drink, you are very strong,” the waiter told me.
A few hours later I was at OIL, a nightclub a short drive from the hotel, listening to techno in a dark room full of dry ice. Aptly, the event was called Silicon Kure.
Outside I met an Australian musician called Ben, who performs as Biting Eye. He told me about his unsuccessful attempt to break into the London music scene two decades earlier. This was particularly unjust, he seemed to feel, because he had been “huge in Melbourne.”
He also complained about foreign DJs who arrived in China and became considerably more important than they had ever been back home.
I wrote down Massive in Melbourne.
It seemed immediately useful.
China’s additive manufacturing industry has become difficult to map. Companies appear quickly. Some are enormous but almost unknown outside China. Others possess excellent overseas marketing and rather less substance. On an earlier trip, more than a decade ago, I encountered two legally separate Chinese companies with effectively identical names. I asked how I was supposed to distinguish them.
The answer was that one wrote its name in uppercase.
“Massive in Melbourne” became shorthand for the problem. Who actually mattered? Who had the installed base, customers, manufacturing capacity and technology? Who was merely very good at saying that they did?
My notebook put it less politely: who was the bossman of bounce and who were the shysters of shuffle?
It was not a problem I was going to solve in a nightclub.
But OIL would turn out to be a surprisingly useful place to keep trying.
The 3D printers that weren’t there
The following day I went to Huaqiangbei.
For anyone interested in technology, Shenzhen’s electronics markets have acquired almost mythical status. Floors and floors of components, gadgets, repair shops, cameras, LEDs, circuit boards, tools, and products whose purpose is not always immediately apparent.
There were drones everywhere.
AI pets.
Tiny electric razors.
Cameras.
Night-vision equipment making claims I was not especially inclined to test.
LEDs by the mile.
And almost no 3D printers.
After walking around for some time, I realised I had seen precisely one: a Creality machine in a shop that also sold assorted electronics and LaserPecker equipment.
This was not what I had expected.
Shenzhen is one of the most important cities in the world for desktop additive manufacturing, yet Huaqiangbei was a useful reminder of just how small our industry looks when placed inside the wider electronics and manufacturing ecosystem that surrounds it.
The 3D printer was not the story. The fact that virtually everything needed to build, modify, package, market and ship a new electronic product existed somewhere around it was closer to the point. Shenzhen’s advantage is frequently described using words such as scale or cost. Over the coming days, another possibility kept appearing.
Speed.
The distance between an idea and something a customer could actually buy felt unusually short. But Shenzhen was also very good at making any definitive statement look stupid five minutes later.
Outside, a drone delivery booth offered one vision of Shenzhen’s future. Scooter couriers racing along the pavement offered another. The future was certainly arriving, and it was arriving unevenly.
You cannot speak when the music is so violent
A thunderstorm drove thousands of people into the malls around COCO Park.
I returned to Commune for a Negroni and watched the storm while the single enormous ice cube seemed to steam as the cocktail receded around it. Across the way, Ed Sheeran and Bee Gees covers blasted from a German-themed bar. Eventually I ordered a GAC Trumpchi to OIL. The LEDs lining the rear cabin made it feel like being trapped inside a 2015 custom gaming PC.
The set times supplied a good omen. Playing until 2am was a DJ called DDD, also the stock-market ticker for 3D Systems.
Pattern recognition was becoming a problem.
Outside, I started talking to someone who had studied in the UK before returning to Shenzhen. Within minutes it emerged that he had just started marketing for a new 3D printing company. Of course he had.
Later I spoke to a French music producer. We talked about old gabber, their Boiler Room set, hip-hop and his dislike of increasingly precise genre labels. Older ravers, he said, recognised something in the newer music. Then he gave a better explanation of the whole thing.
“You can not speak when the music is so violent.”
There was something in that. We had spent ten minutes putting increasingly precise labels on music that made those labels feel rather beside the point. Then the set started.
At 3am I was back at the hotel ordering room service.
The final question of the evening:
Would I like my Coca-Cola cold, or room temperature?
The drone worked
The next morning I went looking for drone-delivered coffee. The Meituan app resisted my attempts to order. I switched between translation software and the ordering interface until another sound interrupted me. The distinct high-pitched buzz of modern warfare.
Out of the sky appeared a bright yellow six-propeller aircraft. It hovered above a squat, off-white collection point on the corner of Kerry Plaza and Festival Avenue before lowering a box onto the rooftop mechanism. Someone appeared almost immediately, collected brunch, and disappeared. The drone flew away for another day of mechanical servitude. This was impressive.
Then a family arrived and attempted to place an order. I started a timer. After around three minutes, they appeared to give up.
Meanwhile, the streets remained full of scooter couriers solving urban congestion through the rather less technically ambitious method of driving on the pavement.
The drone worked. I couldn’t make the app work. My original hardware/software prejudice had survived another encounter. For now.
Several Shenzhens
OCT-LOFT is a former industrial area converted into galleries, cafés, design shops and cultural spaces.
It is the type of development familiar in many cities, except Shenzhen is young enough that parts of its industrial past have already been turned into aesthetic objects while industrialisation continues at extraordinary speed elsewhere.
I described OCT in my notebook as a “gentrified pastiche of industrial manufacturing gone by.”
Then a delivery rider in a yellow shirt jumped from his scooter, cigarette barely concealed, rushed into a polished bakery, collected an order and disappeared.
On the journey toward Shekou I saw landscaping crews resting by the road and then hundreds of construction workers in yellow helmets around Wanghai Road. Temporary multi-storey accommodation had been erected alongside the work.
The polished version of Shenzhen never lasted for long before another city appeared behind it.
That evening I travelled to meet Wenjie Tan, founder of the 3D Printing Resource Library.
The drive supplied the transition perfectly. Buildings became older. There was less glass. Fewer road signs were bilingual. The malls looked less polished. Then Tencent’s headquarters appeared. The new Shenzhen was back.
Wenjie’s office was in an industrial and science park. We spoke through translation software for five and a half hours. For roughly the first hour and a half, I interviewed him. Then he interviewed me.
After that, we went to dinner and continued talking. This was where many of the assumptions I had brought with me started becoming harder to sustain.
The standard explanations for China’s additive manufacturing growth are familiar: government support, cheap manufacturing, copying Western technology, scale.
None is entirely useless.
None is sufficient.
The Chinese industry Wenjie described was larger, messier, and less centrally legible than those explanations allow. An enormous amount of 3D printing activity occurs outside the companies most familiar to Western readers. Applications can be commercially important without producing English-language press releases. Government support matters, but explaining every successful Chinese company as a product of state policy quickly becomes a substitute for examining why particular businesses actually work.
Eventually we stopped discussing industrial policy.
At dinner a small barbecue was lit at the table and slowly filled with meat skewers. “I will order, it will be faster,” Wenjie told me.
A second grill arrived with a fish. “My grandfather was a farmer, never waste food.”
Later, through the translation software:
“I was worried you couldn’t eat chillies.”
“I grow chillies,” I replied.
By then the interview had ceased to feel like an interview.
Shenzhen’s real product might be time
The following morning I travelled north to Guangming.
Shenzhen begins to make more sense when you spend an hour driving across it.
Motorways cut through dense vegetation. Tunnels pass beneath mountains. Concrete apartment blocks and glass towers appear together. Longhua, Dalang and other districts stretch past the windows.
The central districts can give the impression of a single continuous city. The municipality is much larger, stretching north toward Dongguan and Huizhou. My notebook attempted the inevitable comparison: roughly two Londons’ worth of people inside an area only somewhat larger than London.
I had been trying very hard not to write that China was big.
My driver eventually dropped me off.
We took a selfie. He drove away.
I realised I was in the wrong place.
I opened Didi again.
The same driver accepted the job and returned to take me another 15 minutes down the road.
So much for the heroic arrival at the factory.
Huafast was worth finding.
Sven, its founder, poured red tea from his wife’s hometown. We showed each other photographs of our families. His English name comes from DOTA, which he has played since 2011.
The company had only recently moved into the site. Parts were still being fitted out. His office, in addition to the more standard furniture, contained a tea table with built-in heating and drainage, a camp bed and a guitar.
Then came the 3D printers.
Rows upon rows of desktop machines producing parts.
The headline number from Huafast is the scale of the network, which runs into the thousands of printers. But standing inside it, the number was less interesting than the operating logic.
Huafast can see an idea, put products into production quickly, test demand and scale what works.
My notebook says:
> “It is the speed of idea to customer that makes the farm work, meme products. Although 3 years later that dragon is still selling.”
The famous articulated dragons may have become a cliché of desktop 3D printing, but clichés occasionally persist because customers continue buying them.
What mattered at Huafast was not simply that thousands of machines could make objects. It was how quickly those machines could respond.
No tooling, no commitment to an enormous first production run. Launch something. Test variations. Watch demand. Increase production if it works. Stop if it doesn’t.
Shenzhen’s real product may be time.
Cheap labour mattered historically. Scale matters. Supplier density matters.
But shortening the path from idea to product to customer, then feeding the response back into the next product, may be a better way to understand what makes the ecosystem difficult to reproduce.
A tour of the materials operation made the point physically. Dozens of 1,000 kg bags of PLA granules, production lines in one building and roughly 35 filament lines on the ground floor of another. Material was being produced both for internal consumption and for white-label customers.
The printer farm was impressive. The factory beneath the factory was more important.
So much for the software theory
Later that day I visited CBD-Tech, the company behind CHITUBOX.
This presented an immediate problem for the theory I had been developing since the airport.
China is good at hardware but struggles with software? CHITUBOX is software. More importantly, it sits inside one of the largest resin-printing ecosystems in the world.
The useful question was therefore no longer whether China could build software. Clearly it could. The better questions concerned what kinds of software Chinese companies were particularly successful at building, how tightly that software was connected to hardware, how products were commercialised and why the user experience remained so inconsistent elsewhere.
Every useful generalisation about Shenzhen appeared to contain the mechanism for its own destruction.
The following afternoon at ELEGOO provided another perspective. This meeting felt completely different. No tea. No family photographs. Little preamble. Straight to business. The conversation was useful precisely because it exposed some of the strategic choices facing Chinese desktop printer companies.
Bambu Lab had demonstrated the commercial power of tightly integrated machines, software and user experience. Competitors were being forced to decide how closely to follow.
Open ecosystems had helped build desktop 3D printing. Closed or semi-closed ecosystems could arguably make machines considerably easier to use, and support a more recognisable business model. Those are not merely engineering decisions. They are decisions about who controls the customer. The vocal early adopters who valued the ability to tinker with their machines are increasingly lost in the volume of those buying a 3D printer as a means to an end.
That question increasingly interested me more than who could make the fastest printer.
That evening I travelled to Bao’an to meet the 3D printing industry’s own “Mr Worldwide” Tuan Tranpham. Upstairs in the executive lounge, we traded industry gossip over martinis.
There is considerably more to that story, but by this point I had learned that trying to squeeze every interesting conversation into one article was exactly how you end up writing something unreadable.
Besides, Formnext Shenzhen started the next morning.
After almost a week in Shenzhen, I was finally going to see the official version of the industry I had come to report on.
I was already feeling the familiar urge to pull these loose threads into an overarching theory of global manufacturing, geopolitics, industrial policy and technological competition, all neatly explained in a couple of thousand words.
That would, of course, be exactly the sort of thing the trip was teaching me not to do.
The illusion of the schedule
I love an opening ceremony. Ribbon cuttings come a close second, and it was a good year for the Shenzhen harvest.
Backed by the rousing French horns of the Star Trek: The Next Generation theme, dignitaries poured coloured sand into the Formnext logo. The show organisers then very graciously arranged an official media tour. There was Bambu Lab, a brief overview, an attempted tech demonstration at another company and a desktop CNC machine.
Watching someone type prompts into an AI interface turns out to be exactly as exciting as it sounds. Much of the allotted time was spent waiting. Eventually I wrote down:
> “The illusion of the schedule – it appeared there was a plan, but someone had forgotten to tell the companies.”
It looked organised. Reality was improvisational.
Again, Shenzhen.
Once I escaped the tour and started arranging my own interviews, the show became far more useful. VMP took me into metal powder. Diligine Photonics into optics.
The questions were becoming more specific.
Printer manufacturers are the most visible layer of additive manufacturing, and inevitably much of the conversation around China’s industry begins there. But the further I went, the more interesting the layers underneath became.
Who made the powder?
Who made the laser?
Who shaped and controlled the beam?
Who supplied the sensors and optical components inside the machine?
Who wrote the software?
And, increasingly, who controlled the relationship with the customer?
The deeper I went into the supply chain, the less useful “Chinese 3D printer industry” became as a category. What I was looking at was an industrial system.
Who explains China?
That evening there was a media dinner. Twenty-two people attended. I counted perhaps five whom I would describe conventionally as journalists.
The rest represented the increasingly blurry world around industrial media: content businesses, directories, influencers, sponsored publishing, video creators, marketing and companies whose precise relationship with journalism depends heavily on who pays for the prawn crackers.
There was good food. There was a massive mechanised Lazy Susan. There was indoor smoking, one of China’s minor pleasures that I recognise is unlikely to make the tourist board campaign.
The room raised a question that had been nagging at me throughout the trip.
Who actually explains China to the rest of the world?
And what incentives shape that explanation?
China’s manufacturing industries are difficult to understand from outside. Language is one barrier. Access is another. Companies do not necessarily communicate in ways familiar to Western journalists. Important businesses may be almost invisible internationally while minor companies can appear important through relentless marketing.
Against that background, simple stories have an advantage.
China is copying.
China is winning.
China is cheap.
China is subsidised.
China is the future.
China is collapsing.
All can generate attention.
None survives very long once you start travelling between the companies.
Then the evening became stranger.
Someone showed me a new website. I recognised the material.
It had been taken from 3D Printing Industry, rewritten and republished with our images.
I had flown to China looking for stories and discovered one of my stories already waiting for me.
After dinner, I explained that publishing something on the internet did not turn it into free raw material for somebody else’s AI content operation and asked for the material to be removed.
There is another article in that.
There were now several other articles in almost everything.
One more night at OIL
On Thursday I went back to OIL.
By then the trip had acquired its own cast: local ravers, Europeans working in Shenzhen, people from robotics and medical devices, and someone involved in customs data.
Then I stepped outside and called home.
A group of local children heard me speaking English and cautiously moved closer.
One waved.
I pointed at my phone.
“My boy.”
My three-year-old was on the screen.
Suddenly all the children were waving at him. He waved and laughed back.
Earlier in the week Sven had shown me photographs of his son, who is around the same age, and joked that our boys should become friends.
Watching these children wave at mine from a patio outside a nightclub in Shenzhen, I got the feeling he was right.
Later, listening to a rolling arpeggiated synth line from a live set, another thought entered the notebook.
I had been lucky to be young in the 1990s.
Now, in the middle of the 2020s, I could travel to almost anywhere in the world and find some version of the music I had grown up with.
Shenzhen had changed enormously since I first visited China.
The additive manufacturing industry had changed enormously.
I had changed.
Yet somehow I was still in a dark club listening to machines make repetitive noises at unreasonable volume.
Continuity comes in unexpected forms.
Looking underneath the printer
By the final day of Formnext, I had started mentally pulling the machines apart into their bill of materials.
Could Chinese metal powder retain its price advantage after tariffs?
Where did the lasers come from? The optics? The pyrometers and other sensors?
At BCX, beam shaping opened another layer inside the laser system. Components that barely feature in the marketing of a 3D printer could determine its performance, cost and ultimately how much of the machine was actually Chinese.
Software produced another complication. At the show, I kept asking about Chinese additive manufacturing software and received surprisingly few leads.
The printer increasingly looked like the visible end of a much larger industrial stack.
Eventually I spotted a company that appeared promising.
It was German.
CoreTechnologie’s 4D_Additive software was being represented in China through a local partner.
When I asked for Chinese alternatives, one of the few names offered was VoxelDance.
Elsewhere, NAGA talked about 41 filament production lines and hundreds of tonnes of monthly capacity.
Someone walked past wearing a “Burebrey” polo shirt.
The clichés were still stalking me.
Nine days earlier, Chinese 3D printers had been the obvious starting point.
I was leaving thinking about powder economics, beam profiles, software certification, optical components, pyrometers, filament production, distribution and who ultimately controls the relationship with the user.
That felt like progress.
The more closely I looked, the less China resembled a single industrial competitor and the more it resembled thousands of overlapping systems operating at different levels of sophistication.
There was extraordinary hardware and terrible software.
There was extraordinary software.
There were copycats.
There was genuine innovation.
There were companies competing primarily on price and companies trying to build defensible technology.
There were huge factories and tiny teams.
There was government support and ferocious private competition.
There were products that looked futuristic and apps that made me want to throw my phone into the sea.
Almost any definitive statement became wrong as soon as I travelled another few kilometres.
It was time to leave.
For the first time I took the elevated road toward the airport in daylight.
Through the sea mist, the 55-kilometre Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge appeared.
Another reminder of Chinese engineering prowess, and perhaps a reminder that sometimes clichés hold for a reason.
China is big.
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Featured image shows a delivery rider crossing COCO Park in Futian. Photo by Michael Petch.
