China 3D Printing Market Thought Highly
Jan 28, 2013 (Menafn - SinoCast Daily Business Beat via COMTEX) --China is expected to become a major 3D printing market in the near future.
David Reis, CEO of leading global professional 3D printing equipment maker Stratasys SSYS, forecasted in an interview on January 24 in Hong Kong that capacity of the global professional 3D printing equipment market would hit one million units. The firm saw accumulative sales volume hit only 20,000 units currently, but rising attention drawn by the industry caused the CEO to be quite confident.
Stratasys, the No.1 professional 3D printing equipment maker in the world, announced a merger with Israel-based 3D printing firm Objet in December 2012 and the newborn, with about 50 percent share in the global professional 3D printing equipment market, has exceeded US-based 3D System DDD in terms of sales.
Elan Jaglom, founder of Objet and co-chairman of the board of Stratasys, disclosed that Objet began negotiating with Stratasys over a merger as early as 2003, but failed to reach an agreement later. The major reason was that both of them had invested huge resources in the field and believed that they each would embrace a sales upsurge on their own. However, the market grew slowly and the size of the global 3D printing market, including the printing material sector, reached only USD 2.14 billion in 2012. In order to boost the market, they had a plan to cooperate with each other and a merger took place finally. After the merger, they saw corporate size exceed major archrival 3D Systems, with market value approaching to USD 3 billion. Financial data from Stratasys showed that the compound revenue growth stood at 22 percent from 2009 to 2011. The compound net income growth was more than 60 percent and the gross margin of products was up to 61.2 percent.
Stratasys has over 8,000 clients currently, covering industries including medical treatment, automobiles, aviation, and education. However, the purchase volume of those clients hits only 20,000 units in total. This indicates that the market size is still very small and in line with David Reis, there are many bottlenecks in the industry. For instance, the material choices are limited. In addition, the equipment operation is not very mature.
Elan Jaglom reiterated that China saw its professional 3D printing market be still in an initial growth period currently and the average price of products it sold to the market was lower than that of those sold to European and the US markets. However, it thought highly of the market as it was the biggest manufacturing base around the globe.
(USD 1 = CNY 6.22)
Source: www.nf.nfdaily.cn (January 28, 2013)
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