Once in a while we hear mysterious rumors about 2D printing giant Hewlett Packard buying out Stratasys. Now we’re reading about such a possibility in Seeking Alpha. Seeking Alpha proposes that HP may be “missing out” on the new wave of printing: 3D printing. While they’re experts at 2D printing, they have yet to do anything significant in 3D printing.
That’s not to say HP has no experience with 3DP. In fact they do have some experience as they signed an agreement with Stratasys the other year to resell Stratasys’ uPrint 3D printers under an HP label. This agreement triggered marketing of the HP device in Europe, but it hasn’t seemed to have gone very far. While we did observe an HP device being manufactured during a recent visit to Stratasys, it seems that not very many of them are being sold. Maybe HP is missing out?
Meanwhile, Stratasys seems to have gone in another direction away from HP by merging with Objet, who offer another 3D printing process to add to Stratasys’.
Seeking Alpha suggests that *somebody* should buy either Stratsys/Objet or 3D Systems. HP perhaps, or even General Electric or 3M. They also suggest that these potential buyers may be waiting for the industry to mature and for financial difficulties to pass.
We think: maybe. At this point we’d be very surprised if any of these traditional companies know very much about 3D printing and even more surprised if they had a strategy for growing it.
Via Seeking Alpha
