You can print out a plastic cup. You could also go down to your local big-box store and buy a pack of six, or 600, in about as much time as it would take for any modern consumer 3-D printer to whip up a single shape. What’s the advantage to printing that cup? In fact, if you look around you, I’d be surprised if you could point out a single thing that you could obtain faster and more effectively by crafting it with a 3-D printer than you could by simply going out to buy it.
Source: Flickr.
A home user, in nearly every case, will probably want to see finished products from their 3-D printers to justify the purchase. Businesses, on the other hand, don’t necessarily need to justify owning a 3-D printer in manufacturing terms. Many of them are likely to have legitimate design reasons for owning such a printer, and are also likely to have at least one team member with the expertise to make proper use of such a machine. Even occasional 3-D printer use can be justified in many offices when the price tag is below $2,000.
How manufacturing might die (eventually)
Enterprise-quality 3-D printers could become the growth driver that pushes the industry into its own PC era — the age when mass adoption becomes not only affordable, but practical. It wasn’t consumers who initially drove PC adoption in the early 80s, after all — businesses and schools were big buyers of the first true desktop computers.
Consider that only 6,500 professional 3-D printers sold in 2011. Even if we assume that sales doubled in 2012, and each business bought only one professional 3-D printer, this new total leaves another 99.8% of business establishments in the U.S. as potential customers. 3D Systems Corporation (NYSE:DDD) and Stratasys, Ltd. (NASDAQ:SSYS) combined for a high-end revenue estimate of $930 million in the 2013 fiscal year — a bit less than half of estimated total industry revenue. If just 2% of U.S. business establishments (there were about 7.6 million, not counting government workers or the self-employed, in 2008) bought a single hypothetical $2,000 professional 3-D printer, it’d generate $300 million in revenue from the sale of 152,000 printers. This doesn’t account for international sales or for the sales of print materials and services — or, for that matter, any sales to schools.
Source: Flickr.
Notice any problems with these numbers? The two biggest 3-D printing companies already expect to make three times this much in 2013. For their growth to continue well past 2016, adoption of these lower-cost professional machines will have to accelerate or the high-end printers of 2016 will have to justify their exorbitant cost against a flood of inexpensive competition — or both. Industrial-size 3-D printer company ExOne Co (NASDAQ:XONE) sold only 13 of its machines in 2012, and it could be hard-pressed to find buyers for its million-dollar printers if anyone can replicate their material diversity and massive print areas at a fraction of the price. Think back (if you can) to the demise of mainframe computers. PCs replaced the mainframe, and PC manufacturers grew to be worth many times the value of Wang Labs and its contemporaries by shipping dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of times the computers per year as any mainframe maker had ever sold before. But a PC also fulfilled a wider range of needs and wants in the marketplace than a low-cost 3-D printer might.
