There are some big investments happening in the 3D print world, contrary to recent gloom.
An article in Payload describes how rocket maker Ursa Major intends on buying “several industrial 3D printers” for their Ohio operation. The investment is said to be over US$14M, and should be quite a boost to the lucky 3D printer manufacturer selling the equipment to Ursa Major.
Another story in Forbes discusses North Carolina-based Restor3D, which obtained US$70M in investment to expand their business to 3D print customized orthopedic implants. Their approach is to perform a 3D scan of patients and use specialized software to compose a suitable 3D model for printing.
This is all very good news for these companies, but somehow seems at odds with the current black cloud hanging over the 3D print industry.
We’re told that there is virtually no investment in 3D print companies. We see large players that entered the market with enormous valuations drop 90% in value or more over the past two years. We see big 3D printer companies trying desperately to buy each other to reduce administrative costs and boost their customer bases.
That doesn’t sound good.
So how can both of these things be true?
It’s because the overall 3D print market is not a single thing; it’s an aggregation of all of the activity by participants. Some of them are succeeding, and some are not.
Much of the gloom is based on principles of investing: venture capital folks believed in many 3D print startups a few years ago and injected staggering sums of money into them. They had expectations that the money would help the companies build out products and services that would grow strongly, perhaps even taking a notable bite out of the massive manufacturing market. They would get their money back many times over.
Except they didn’t.
Instead we all learned that the technologies produced by these eager startups were not quite compatible with larger-scale manufacturing, so a huge portion of potential market faded away. This caused the stock prices to fall, and gloom appeared.
Meanwhile, there are multiple smaller companies boldly exploring different application niches for 3D printing. Some of them are quite successful, and growing. In the two examples above — and there are more — we can see how it is entirely possible for companies to succeed: if they have the right technology for the right application.
To me the gloom is partial: only certain types of companies are in a bad way. Those would be highly overvalued companies that had ambitious greater than their technology and ability allowed, or companies that are not able to keep up with recent technological improvements.
For the rest there is plenty of good news. Many 3D printer manufacturers lose money, but I’ve spoken to quite a few that do make money. Those that aren’t profitable survive from their investments, but that isn’t going to last forever.
This is not a new phenomenon. Recall the old Greek legend of Icarus, someone with new technology that flew too close to the sun, then crashed and burned.
But the others on the ground survived.
