Additive Industries is on the move.
The Eindhoven-based 3D metal printing system manufacturer is relocating to a new, vastly larger facility. The new location is still in Eindhoven, and in fact is quite near their current two locations where operations have been split.
They explain:
In order to realise this ambition, the company will move its Eindhoven headquarters to a brand new factory close to its current location early April. The new site will consolidate Headquarters, Development and System Assembly & Test Operations, which are currently spread over 2 locations in Eindhoven. This move will enable the fast growing team of Additive Industries to expand further since the total floor space is roughly seven times more than its current combined facilities.
The new space is apparently 7X larger than their current spaces. This is significant.
But a bit of background first: the company launched not very long ago with a bold concept: they realized that anyone using existing 3D metal printing technology of the time would face a workflow challenge. The “3D printing” part of producing a metal part was only one relatively small part of the journey, which actually requires a number of post processing steps that were typically done entirely manually.
And as you know, manual effort can be expensive, error-prone, inconsistent and generally inefficient. But efficiency is the key to profitable 3D metal printing. Additive Industries’ concept involved wrapping all (or as many as they could manage) of those workflow steps into a single, modular platform.
Thus they could deliver a machine that could make 3D metal printing more efficient for clients, and even reduce training requirements, as their MetalFAB 1 machine does most of the work.
It was a very new concept at the time, and while some of their 3D metal printing competitors have finally caught on to this idea and are beginning to recognize the client workflow dilemma, Additive Industries is moving forward strongly.
So strongly, apparently, that they’ve been able to justify an enormous factory that’s SEVEN times larger than their current facility. If that’s not a statement of confidence, I don’t know what is.
You might suggest that such a large expansion might be premature or ill-conceived. That may be so, but in my encounters with Additive Industries, I’ve found them to be remarkably competent in their decisions and management.
Additive Industries has stated publicly they wish to be in the “Top 3” of 3D metal printing by 2022, so this seems to be the real deal.
