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Challenges Face Metal 3D Printing Powder Suppliers in 2020

Most AM companies which report public information noted during their Q1 releases that they expected Q2 to be much more heavily impacted by COVID-19. They weren’t wrong. Shutdowns and uncertainties didn’t actually hit Western firms until March. But it’s no secret that the metal additive manufacturing industry was already in the midst of tougher times throughout 2019 — we’ve written about it pretty extensively at SmarTech.

Most of the ongoing metal AM slump story involved hardware. Metal powder sales have remained excellent. Total shipments of powders for the year in 2019 grew an estimated 37 percent compared to 2018, to an estimated 2,650 tons shipped to AM users. SmarTech estimates that in the first quarter of 2019 alone -just three months -there was as much powder sold and shipped to users as there was in all of 2014 combined; about 550 tons!
Sales of powders have been driven by the relatively small community of AM power users which have reached serial production on certain components especially in aerospace, medical, and oil and gas. These successes include Stryker’s Tritanium product line, GE’s continued scale up of additive parts in its LEAP engines and gas turbines, Siemens gas turbine burners, and more. It has also been driven by several service providers.
Successful implementations of AM continue to drive powder sales. While signs of some commoditization of mainstream additive powders have begun to emerge, SmarTech believes that the AM powder market will be temporarily thrust to the forefront over the next year.
The metal additive material market is witnessing new dynamics never before seen in additive manufacturing. In 2020, diversity in materials for additive manufacturing has made significant strides compared to just five years ago. Though significant steps still are needed in this area, development of processing parameters for new additive metal powders can be a lengthy endeavor. For example, while there have historically been just four metals comprising the nickel and cobalt additive materials segment (a number which persisted for several years), today there are at least double that many alloys now offered by more than one large AM material supplier between these two major metals. Cobalt Alloy 188 and 509, as well as Nickel Alloy 230 and Inconel 738 are now widely available, to name a few.

In this PRO we show how the additive materials business has done well through the down turn, but may be about to hit its own little recession due to product maturity. Nonetheless, no supplier of metal additive manufacturing powder should worry too much. The long-term prospects for AM materials are encouraging.

(Feature image courtesy of Equispheres.)

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Additive Manufacturing: The Ongoing Uncertainties and Market Shares

SmarTech Analysis has recently published its Q1 2020 additive manufacturing market guidance for the metal additive manufacturing industry, highlighting the first quarter in an economic universe gripped by effects of coronavirus. The question on everyone’s minds these days is, “just what will the bottom line impact be with regards to COVID 19?”

Most in the AM industry still don’t know. No AM company is able to provide firm expectations for 2020, and certainly not into 2021. And it is this lack of expectations, or at least the continual presence of uncertainty, which may end up being the key market driver for additive manufacturing in the near future.

During the first quarter of the year, the metal additive hardware market was hit hard, down about 33 percent year over year compared to 2019. It’s worth noting however that Q1 2019 was the best first quarter in terms of metal AM hardware revenue in history.

To add a little more context for Q1. Revenues were down about 28 percent versus the average quarterly market revenue from the last twelve consecutive quarters. While that paints a grim picture, during the first three months of the year, revenues from material sales of metal powders and sales of metal AM services were much less dire. Metal powder sales increased slightly year over year, though they declined compared to the previous consecutive quarter for the first time in recent history. Services revenues for metals declined just 3 percent. In this article we examine the state of play of the AM industry as it starts its planning for 2021, along with the market shares of its leading players.

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Metal Additive Market Reset. How Leading Metal AM Firms Will Weather the Economic Storm

First quarter 2020 market data continues to become available from the world’s leading additive manufacturing companies, shedding more light on how the economic fallout from the global pandemic is impacting the AM industry. Although interest in additive manufacturing has surged as a result of the supply chain interruptions, and some companies believe big opportunities are out there, most agree with SmarTech that it’s going to be a bumpy ride for the remainder of the year for metal additive companies.

Throughout 2019, the industry was already struggling as the pool of customers ready to scale up metal AM operations proved too small to support the relatively large number of suppliers who were lured in the market over the last few years hoping the impending boom in AM that never came. This combined with the current economic woes creating a round of industry consolidation. In 2016, GE shook up the industry by acquiring Concept Laser and Arcam out of identifying long term opportunities for metal AM. This may have been the start of something big.

Supply Chain Interruptions put Polymer 3D Printing Technologies Back on the Map, but What About Metals?

During the early stages of the pandemic in the United States, a number of primarily polymer 3D printing solutions were able to be put to use to provide a stopgap for production of a variety of critical parts. Metal technologies also were leveraged, but the applications for metals were longer term projects, such as development of advanced respirator filters, medical facility components made in antimicrobial metals, and other parts. As a result, the COVID crisis has done quite a bit to put polymer 3D printing technologies back into the media spotlight and demonstrate their use as a production tool under various circumstances. But where do metals find themselves in a post-COVID market?

Source: SmarTech Analysis Metal Additive Manufacturing Advisory Service.

The chart above highlights the “best case” scenario for Q1 2020 metal additive manufacturing market opportunities for hardware and materials based on the most current data SmarTech had at the time of writing this article.

Compared to 2019, metal AM hardware revenues declined 14 percent. However, by the time final data is collected for the quarter, it is likely that declines of 20 percent will be seen market-wide for metals.
Meanwhile, metal powder sales were not as heavily affected during Q1 but are much more likely to be impacted during Q2.

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Future Additive Market Strategies: First Quarter 2020 Financial Reports

The financial world has been holding its collective breath in anticipation of the release of financial results from influential AM companies after the first quarter of 2020 came to its close at the end of March. This was just as the coronavirus pandemic was beginning to hit its peak in much of the Western world.

COVID-19 got worse after that, birthing worries that Q2 will be even worse than Q1. Also, the 3D printing and additive manufacturing industry, sprang into action amid shortfalls of ventilator components and personal protective equipment in Q1 to produce critical components on-demand for virus crisis. As Covid-19 subsides in Q3 and Q4, this opportunity will also subside. Leaving a big question mark of what comes next for AM in a devastated worldwide economy.

The pandemic itself seems to be quite serious for periods of about three months based on results from different countries around the world. After that, however, its ongoing effects appear to much less severe barring any possible serious resurgences. In many ways – obviously – this is very good news.

However, somewhat perversely any opportunities to jump in and meet critical supply chain failures are probably going to be limited. In other words, AM companies that are hopeful to be able to weather the storm by directly servicing demand from broken supply chains and medical equipment may be left disappointed.

In this article we’ve highlighted three leading companies in the industry – all multifaceted providers who own multiple additive technology platforms. These companies are involved in the sale of printers, materials, and operation of on-demand manufacturing businesses which utilize their own and other additive technologies. We have analyzed their Q2 results carefully to see what these numbers tell us about what is next for AM.

We also discuss here how leading 3D printing and additive manufacturing companies need to pivot and address challenges throughout the rest of 2020 in light of their published first quarter financial results.

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Beyond the Virus – How the 3D Printing Industry’s Response to Pandemic Will Shape Its Future

By Scott Dunham
Vice President of Research, SmarTech Analysis

It’s time to start looking at where additive manufacturing will go in a “post COVID-19” world. More precisely, what does the additive manufacturing industry need to do to capture the market’s reinvigorated appetite for digital manufacturing as the initial wave of stop-gap crisis support fades, but the impacts of the virus remain?

In the past few months, providers of various 3D printing solutions and technologies have been utilizing the rapid production capabilities of modern printers to produce critical medical components to provide adaptive care for coronavirus patients. This has put the global spotlight back on 3D printing to a degree that we haven’t seen for a few years, but the challenges with scaling 3D printing technologies and deploying them as an effective production tool haven’t changed. What happens from here?

It may take months for supply chains to recover and the economic impacts of government actions taken to mitigate the spread of the virus will likely last for years. COVID-19 virus will remain a threat after economies begin to cautiously resume activity, causing further potential for supply chain interruption and incentivizing a radical rethinking of long-term corporate strategy and structure. How will AM fit into this brave new world?

As we explain below, much of what happens in the AM sector in the next year to two years will be COVID-19-shaped. Some of this will be related to reshoring of industry to the US. We also believe that AM’s recent successes in the COVID-19 emergency may lead to closer links between “corporate social responsibility” programs and supply chains.

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3DPrint.com PRO: Here’s How Much Medical Equipment the World’s Additive Manufacturing Equipment Could Produce in 2020

3DPrint.com will always be free, but 3DPrint.com PRO is a new product developed for our industry where we give you affordable timely analysis by SmarTech’s VP of Research Scott Dunham. Get PRO here.

Everyone is talking about how the world’s response to the coronavirus is changing daily life across the globe, both temporarily and (speculatively) for the long term. In the wake of COVID-19, the additive manufacturing industry has once again caught the attention of the media in a way reminiscent of the boom in personal printers in 2011 in which many industry opportunists were proclaiming that the collective public could “make anything!” with a 3D printer at home. Today, everyone is talking about how additive manufacturing users are working with governments and medical professionals in times of healthcare crisis to produce critical medical equipment.

3D printer companies like Stratasys, Carbon, and HP are making news headlines for reaching out to customers who have had their own businesses negatively impacted in order to coordinate the re-direction of their printing capacity to produce critical equipment like face shield components or nasal swabs for test kits. Then there are large users with significant deployments of various kinds of 3D printers who may be partnering with medical institutions or governments on their own to produce similar components. Finally, there are also a lot of individual users of low cost printers who are also producing personal protective equipment either for personal use, or for friends in the healthcare profession, or to support charitable coalitions.

All of this activity demonstrates, as many pundits including ourselves here at SmarTech Analysis have theorized, some of the critical value that additive manufacturing technology has in terms of creating flexibility in the supply chain. We’ve seen reports of companies like Carbon producing 15,000 face shields per week. Low cost printer manufacturer Prusa Research has produced 65,000 face shield components in their home of the Czech Republic. Other companies such as Johnson & Johnson reportedly are producing ventilator valves and splitters which increase patient treatment capacity of already operational ventilators.

The long and short of all of this is a win/win scenario for additive manufacturing companies and users alike – with regular business manufacturing operations becoming more negatively impacted as time goes on due to the results of the virus, AM allows companies to pivot to help out in times of need, creating great public brand support, while also creating business opportunities and keeping some workers and equipment working when they might otherwise not be able to. We’ve heard a lot about these efforts as they have grown in frequency and scope with regards to meeting projected shortfalls of medical equipment -but in order to truly demonstrate how adoption of additive manufacturing can aid in times of supply chain crisis, we need to understand the real scope of what deployments of AM can really do. In order to do that, we can apply detailed information about the global characteristics of active additive manufacturing systems combined with the types of medical equipment being produced to quantify just how impactful the AM community could be in this ongoing scenario. What follows is a brief demonstration of the impact that additive manufacturing can have as a collective capability within regional areas, framed around the context of short term medical equipment needs in combating COVID-19.

Matching Up Production Capacity with Medical Equipment Needs

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