At CES 2014 MakerBot CEO Bre Pettis dropped a stat we’d been waiting to hear. Pettis claimed that MakerBot has sold and shipped over 44,000 MakerBot 3D printers so far.
We’re excited because such information is very hard to come by from 3D printer manufacturers. While most manufacturers will claim (correctly) that their sales are “through the roof” or “doubling every week” or some such statement, rarely are actual machine counts said.
We can draw some conclusions from this. We can speculate that MakerBot, being one of the first and most well-known 3D printer companies, has shipped more than almost all other personal 3D printer manufacturers. This puts a cap of, say, 50,000 machines on any other vendor. After MakerBot, we suspect most of the manufacturers have much smaller product volumes, with the exception of 3D Systems’ Cubify line.
We suspect between MakerBot and Cubify, perhaps 100,000+ machines have been shipped. Add in, say, 100,000 from other manufacturers and we could be at approximately 250,000 personal 3D printers out there.
More to come. Pettis expects to hit a million MakerBots in the near future.
