New kids on the block

Large companies with deep pockets bet big on the future of additive manufacturing

The good thing about patents: They reveal, which companies bet big on certain markets. Looking at the history of patent applications in the field of additive manufacturing, it seems, big changes are coming. Click to watch our short video:

Additive Manufacturing has been a pretty “boring” field for many years. A fascinating technology that was just to inefficient and expensive to be applied in much more than prototyping and small series of very expensive parts in the aerospace industry.

But in recent years the picture changed. Little improvements did add up and made more applications of additive manufacturing possible. With every new application, 3-D-Printing comes closer to mass production and the market size for this technology increases several fold. At least Boeing, GE, HP, Epson and many other big companies think so and invest in hardware and software solutions.

The old players like Stratasys and EOS are still in the game, but they have to make sure they can play by the rules of the big guys as well.