At this year’s 3D Print Lyon, I participated in a panel discussion on consolidation, maturing customer demand, and material innovation. Joining me on the global trends panel were Cecile Laverriere, EOS Applications Engineer, Terry Wohlers, Distinguished Fellow of Advanced Manufacturing at ASTM, and Tuan Tranpham, President of AMER & APAC at Anisoprint.
For more in-depth discussion of current AM issues, join Additive Manufacturing Advantage on July 10th, where AM leaders from Aerospace, Space and Defence will meet.
Consolidation in the 3D printing industry, behind the headlines
The grounded conversation signaled an industry in transition. While the question of whether the 3D printing industry is consolidating remains open, panelists largely agreed that the current shake-out phase may prove beneficial, eliminating weak propositions and strengthening viable ones.
Terry Wohlers contextualised the trend, “Consolidation is inevitable. Some companies will go away naturally. Some have great talent and intellectual property. And some are merging just to stay alive.”
Recent high-profile acquisitions by Nano Dimension reignited conversations that date back to the formative mergers of 3D Systems and ZCorp, and of Objet and Stratasys more than a decade ago. But despite headlines, the overall level of consolidation remains low in relative terms. Referencing previous work using the consolidation curve model, I noted that, “If you run the numbers for FY 2023, the combined revenues of Nano Dimension, Desktop Metal, and Markforged total $340 million: just 2.3% of a $15 billion market. That suggests we’re still in the early phases of consolidation.”
This interpretation was supported by a parallel indicator: exhibitor growth at Formnext, the industry’s largest event. While growth has slowed, it continues, underscoring the ongoing proliferation of players rather than contraction.
Beyond the supplier side, Tuan Tranpham noted that consolidation now cuts across the ecosystem, not just among OEMs, but also in service bureaus, customers, and R&D efforts. “What we saw five years ago was a honeymoon phase,” he said. “Now we’re seeing a healthy cleanup. Companies that raised funds without solving real problems are being filtered out.”
Tranpham was clear about what the sector needs to achieve legitimacy, “Goldman Sachs said to be a real industry, you need to be at $100 billion. We won’t get there on prototyping alone. We need to speak the language of production.”
Cecile Laverriere reinforced this point with on-the-ground observations. “I’m happy that customers are no longer saying ‘I want AM because it’s cool,’ but ‘I want AM because it’s efficient’. Some parts in space, for example, simply cannot be manufactured any other way anymore.”
EOS’s transition from ‘design for printing’ to production-validated workflows is also visible in its training initiatives, which now extend from design and simulation through to support optimization and post-processing. Laverriere noted the impact of this shift, “It’s a huge step. We cannot go back.”
Trends in emerging 3D printing technologies
As the discussion shifted toward emerging technologies, materials took centre stage. I highlighted magnesium as one underappreciated opportunity, “It’s lightweight, biocompatible, and relevant for both defence vehicles and healthcare, yet we don’t see it widely deployed at scale.”
Ceramic AM also attracted attention, particularly for zirconia-based parts with high resolution and production-grade characteristics. On the metals side, copper alloys like NASA-developed GRCop-42 continue to gain ground in high-thermal-demand applications such as rocket motor chambers.
However, perhaps the most significant long-term trend will be the acceleration of materials development through AI. “NASA used to take years to refine parameters for a new alloy. With computational alloy design and in-situ data analysis, they can now do it much faster,” I observed.
Among the technical standouts was EOS’s beam shaping innovation. As explained by Laverriere, beam shaping enables a single laser to operate across multiple spot sizes, tailoring energy density to application zones in a part. “The larger spots feed the volume to reduce the cost per part, while smaller spots are retained for fine features and better surface roughness,” she said. The result is reduced build times and expanded viability for cost-sensitive industries such as automotive. EOS reports production times cut by half or more in some cases.
But even more transformative could be design automation powered by AI. “Right now, the machine can do more than what we have in our brain,” Laverriere observed. “We are limited by conventional design tools. AI is a new way to simulate and calculate.” She argued that AI-enhanced design, particularly in combination with generative geometry and real-time simulation, will soon surpass the siloed parametric approaches in common use today.
The Growth of China’s 3D Printing Market
I asked the panel, “Is the centre of innovation shifting from Germany to China?” Wohlers responded, “They’ve learned a lot from the West (Germany, France, Italy, the UK, the US) and started not from scratch but from a higher foundation. In some ways, they’ve now gone ahead.”
That transfer, long underway through the kind of outsourced manufacturing best exemplified by Apple, is now moving upstream, challenging European incumbents not just on volume but also on system complexity. Tranpham drew attention to the rapid advancement in high-laser-count systems emerging from Asia. Historically, the US and Europe have dominated AM revenues, often split roughly 45/40. But the rapid scale-up in China, and broader Asia, is shifting this balance. Laverriere noted the influx of Asian competitors offering machines with more lasers and larger build volumes. “The more lasers you have, the more maintenance and the more sophisticated the coordination. At EOS, we’ve gone a different direction, fewer lasers, but each more productive.”
I observed that this shift in balance ties closely to broader macro trends. “There’s been a pivot in capital from ESG to defense in North America,” I said. “Supply chain sovereignty is no longer theoretical.” Drawing parallels with the ongoing debate around digital sovereignty, I noted, “That same logic is being applied to AM infrastructure.” In this climate, beleaguered European desktop 3D printer manufacturers such as BCN3D face strong competition from China’s low-cost suppliers. Some are responding by pivoting to defense. “By 2026, 30% of UltiMaker’s revenue will come from defense,” I reported, citing a recent interview with Andy Middleton.
Wohlers supplied detailed data from a first-hand account, “A friend from Taiwan who’s worked in AM for over 30 years, now travels to China quarterly. He was staggered by what he saw.” Wohlers proceeded to catalogue China’s AM ecosystem: companies like Bright Laser Technologies (BLT), Farsoon, HBD, Z-Rapid, EPlus3D, TPM3D, and UnionTech are producing parts at volumes unseen in the West, “millions and tens of millions,” according to Wohlers. Manufacturing with 3D printing includes components for cell phones, watches, plus production molds and inserts for shoes and tires.
The scale is difficult to overstate, with many service providers and contract manufacturers. According to Wohlers, BLT reportedly has over 400 large-scale metal powder fusion systems in operation and 400 CNC machines for post-processing, with plans to surpass 1,000 metal AM systems by the end of the year. WeNext has “600 plus” large 3D printers. Wohlers cited over 1,000 high-capacity print farms now operating across China.
“We’ve been dreaming in the West of production-scale AM for decades,” Wohlers said. “But it’s China that’s doing it: in aerospace, automotive, consumer goods, dental, and even mobile phones.”
The implication is clear: the narrative of Western AM leadership requires a reassessment. As production shifts and innovation hubs multiply, the path to industrial-scale additive manufacturing will increasingly run through Asia. Whether this shift becomes a dependency or a prompt for domestic acceleration remains unresolved.
Supply Chains and Industrial Reshoring
The conversation turned toward trade policy and the reconfiguration of supply chains. “Right now (early-June 2025), there’s a 90-day window before new tariffs come into force. Politics is now a variable in procurement.”
Wohlers was blunt about the practical challenges. “Reshoring is something I fully support, but it’s extremely difficult. Formlabs, a US company, manufactures its machines in China. The cost structure just isn’t comparable.”
While national security considerations have driven reshoring attempts in sensitive areas such as defense, aerospace, and semiconductors, the broader consumer market remains globally entangled. Michael Porter’s Competitive Advantage of Nations emphasized long-term systemic conditions, such as domestic rivalry, specialized skills, and sophisticated demand, as the foundation of industrial success. Today’s re-shoring policies reflect a more interventionist shift.
“We might see labor costs rising in China and some production shifting to Vietnam or India. But the idea that we can rewind decades of global integration is naive,” I said. “The genie’s out.” For comparison, the “once in a generation investment” U.S. CHIPS and Science Act 2022 allocated $52 billion, spread over five years, to secure domestic semiconductor manufacturing, according to journalist Patrick McGee, “Apple’s investments in China reached $55 billion per year by 2015.”
AI, Standards, and Strategic Divergence: AM Confronts the Next Decade
Additive manufacturing’s next phase will be shaped by the convergence of software intelligence, certification frameworks, and geopolitical divergence. Looking forward, the panel turned speculative. In the next five to ten years, I argued that standards will be central. “Additive is rich in data, but the qualification burden is duplicated by every company. I’d like to see that broken down, shared databases, interoperable frameworks, more open material qualification.” I cited the ASTM Additive Manufacturing Certification Program, launched during the event, as a promising shift. Wohlers expanded, “To go mainstream, we need process trust. Certifications like this will make that possible.”
Questions from the audience turned the discussion to transatlantic divergence. Why, asked one European machine builder, was the US growing while Europe stagnated?
Wohlers identified regulatory and entrepreneurial differences. “In the US, it takes $50 and 20 minutes to start an LLC. In Germany, that used to take months. The culture supports failure. We reward trying.” I added a single word: “Marketing. Americans know how to tell their story. That drives adoption.”
Laverriere, who works across Europe and the US, offered an operational view: “European customers ask what’s possible. They go away, test, and think. Americans say, ‘Here’s what I need. Deliver it in six months.’ They integrate and optimize faster.”
As additive manufacturing matures, its future will depend both on hardware specs and on systemic alignment: standards, software, and industrial philosophy. The next breakthroughs may not come from lasers or build speeds, but from building the common language that lets a distributed industry speak, and build, with confidence. The winners will be those who can translate machine capacity into qualified, secure, and scalable industrial systems.
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Featured image from 3D Print Lyon 2025. Photo by Nicolas Rodet.
