Xact Metal is shifting their focus towards commercialization.
The Pennsylvania-based company has been around only since 2017, and we first encountered them in May of that year. At the time the startup company offered a small volume metal device that was vastly less expensive than the industrial metal 3D printers of the day.
They’ve come a long way since those days. Over the intervening years they’ve executed a technical pivot, developed the XM200S, XM300, introduced copper metal capabilities, sped up 3D printing considerably, and developed a variant focused on the dental industry. We also hear they plan on showing a much faster device at this Fall’s Formnext event.
If you hadn’t noticed, most of those developments were technical in nature. That’s par for the course for a startup company: validate the customer needs and make certain the product(s) meet those needs and are working effectively.
But what happens after that?
According to Xact Metal’s CEO, Juan Mario Gomez, it’s commercialization.
This is the next step a startup business must pursue: once the products are set, try to sell them to as many parties as possible through all feasible sales channels.
The tremendous effort to create the products is always to enable future sales, and that’s the where we now find Xact Metal positioned.
Gomez told us the company has “lots of energy” for this stage, and they’ve been able to make arrangements with “many resellers” to market their equipment on a regional basis.
Resellers are a frequently seen step in a company’s development. Small companies like Xact Metal are usually unable to create a global sales force on their own, so they have to leverage other existing sales operations that have deep convections in each area. In sales, it’s often the relationships that count more than the technology being sold.
The market being addressed by Xact Metal is quite different from the market of the typical industrial metal 3D printer manufacturers, which focus on high-priced part production in aerospace, automotive and healthcare applications.
Instead, Xact Metal’s lower cost solution focuses on industrial operators seeking affordable metal 3D printing capabilties. Gomez explained that their latest model, the XM200G, is faster and offers up to 400W of laser power, all for a cost starting at about US$100K.
That’s a price point that is definitely affordable for many metal operations that are effectively blocked from using the more expensive metal solutions used by aerospace and automotive users. In fact, it’s likely there are far more smaller metal operations than there are larger operations that use the big gear.
It may be that Xact Metal has targeted the right market.
Via Xact Metal
