SmarTech Analysis Annual Report Shows AM Market Grew to Over $10B Worldwide in 2019

For the fourth year in a row, SmarTech Analysis has produced its annual additive manufacturing market summary report that details the current state of the AM business and details where the coming opportunities are to be found in the new year. Featuring insights gathered from the firm’s ongoing quarterly advisory services and ongoing comprehensive full value chain market analysis, the latest iteration of the report found that the global additive manufacturing market grew in 2019 to over $10.4B, crossing the double-digit billion threshold for the first time in its nearly 40-year history.

However, while several complex factors contributed to a second year of slowing growth rates in the industry, long-term opportunities for the high-profile collection of technologies remain highly encouraging. While smaller and new entrants to the market have driven growth the past several quarters, SmarTech believes that larger firms who have properly filled out their product lines will be the main revenue drivers in the future. 

For more information on the report, click here. 

About the Report

The analysis within the 2020 Additive Manufacturing Market Outlook and Summary of Opportunities report focuses on providing segmented market data and insights for the metals, polymer and ceramic additive manufacturing segments, while highlighting influential activities across key AM markets including aerospace, healthcare, automotive, service bureaus and emerging opportunities like consumer goods, energy and industrial.

Forecast metrics presented include: printer installations, revenues and unit sales by print technology in primary tracked industries, as well as geographical metrics; hardware vendor shares by print technology worldwide; global hardware metrics split by printer classification (low cost/prosumer units used professionally versus high-end industrial machines); material shipments and resulting revenues by print technology and material family and geography; additive manufacturing software revenues by software type; and additive manufacturing parts printing services revenues by industry and primary material family.

All presented data includes forecast projections on a 10-year period.

From the Report

SmarTech’s report said that overall growth rates on a quarterly basis for the market dipped during the middle of the year after a relatively strong first quarter and the market has declined just as additive technologies have begun to start penetrating into applications and markets associated with production and manufacturing rather than prototyping, product development and research.

Smaller, more agile players have provided much of the growth across the AM industry during 2019. These companies have seen success due to having technology platforms more focused on the future customer while larger players remained bottlenecked by efforts to industrialize products and platforms of the past to meet current demands, according to SmarTech.

SmarTech says the “fringe” market growth driven by a stream of small startups isn’t sustainable and that at some point, firms must mature into accountable, profitable organizations to deliver mature solutions to customers in a timely fashion.

SmarTech anticipates that while the collective groups of new, nimble, VC-backed companies in the industry will continue to help drive growth for the foreseeable future, the largest established players who have invested into providing a diverse set of additive solutions that can be readily implemented into a broader chain of manufacturing processes will eventually return to driving market revenue.

About SmarTech Analysis:

Since 2013, SmarTech Publishing has published reports on all the important revenue opportunities in the 3D printing/additive manufacturing sector and is considered the leading industry analyst firm providing coverage of this sector. SmarTech analysis and data drives strategy development in the additive industry and has been adopted and presented by many of the industry’s largest firms.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.