How do you think the market for additive manufacturing in the manufacturing industry has developed over the past 12 months?

The market has developed satisfactorily overall. More importantly, however, supply bottlenecks and the increased use of additive manufacturing, or AM for short, for spare parts and end products have also changed the way companies look at it. For the first time, some decision-makers have really realized that 3D printing can also pay off in the long term outside of prototyping. Short development times, flexibility in terms of time and space, as well as the possible improvements in logistics and customer service make the technology attractive. This broader perspective has also made it clear that it is not the pure production costs, but the total cost of ownership that determines whether AM is worthwhile for a component, and that the design freedom of AM enables functional improvements and therefore competitive advantages. Many companies are now systematically looking for meaningful 3D printing applications.

Does the increasing digitalization of production also promote the introduction of additive manufacturing processes or is there no causal relationship?

AM meets the requirements of digitalization and benefits from it. At its core, it is already a digital manufacturing technology and already enables many of the desired benefits of Industry 4.0, including flexible manufacturing: on-demand, decentralized and networked. In addition, manufacturing costs are relatively independent of component complexity and batch size. Components and products can thus be manufactured locally and in line with demand. In order to exploit their full potential within digitally networked production, further work needs to be done on automation and integration into existing production environments. These are also key issues for us.

Looking ahead to the next 12 months: Which technological advances in additive manufacturing will be ready for the market? Which segments will make particular progress?

This is also difficult to answer at the moment due to the pandemic. However, one focus is certainly additive series production. There are already many areas of application in which products with added value or even cheaper products can be additively manufactured in series. However, further developments in terms of cost efficiency, material diversity, automation, productivity and process stability are needed to advance the technology. In this respect, we expect even more productive AM systems, new materials and alloys, greater automation in post-processing and innovative software solutions to increase cost efficiency and process integration.