Home-CECIMO Launches AM-Europe to Unify the Continent’s Additive Manufacturing Ecosystem
CECIMO, the European Association of Manufacturing Technologies, has officially unveiled AM-Europe, a dedicated continental platform designed to consolidate and amplify the additive manufacturing (AM) sector’s presence across Europe. The initiative marks a deliberate structural shift, transforming CECIMO’s longstanding but internally-focused AM activities into an outward-facing, inclusive ecosystem with a distinct European identity.
Rather than a new organisation built from scratch, AM-Europe is best understood as the next stage in CECIMO’s multi-decade engagement with additive manufacturing. The association has long worked alongside industry players, research bodies, and EU policymakers to establish AM as a cornerstone of Europe’s industrial strategy. AM-Europe channels that accumulated experience into a more coordinated, openly participatory structure.
A Founding Coalition and an Open Invitation
The platform has been established by a founding group drawn from across the European AM landscape:UCIMU(Italy),AITA3D,ADDIMAT(Spain), FMTI,SWISSMEM(Switzerland), andAMUK(United Kingdom). These organisations collectively represent machine builders, technology developers, and national manufacturing associations, providing AM-Europe with a geographically and technically diverse starting base.
With the formal launch, AM-Europe is now extending membership to a broader range of actors, national associations, research institutions, and competence centres are all invited to participate. The goal is to move European AM coordination beyond bilateral relationships and toward a structured, continent-wide dialogue capable of speaking with a unified voice in Brussels and beyond.
Strategic Priorities in a New Policy Landscape
The timing of AM-Europe’s launch is deliberate. Additive manufacturing is increasingly on the radar of European policymakers as a technology that can support industrial flexibility, reduce supply chain dependencies, and strengthen capabilities in sectors with strategic importance, among them defence, aerospace, energy, and healthcare.
AM-Europe’s agenda maps directly onto these priorities. Its planned activities span policy advocacy, standardisation efforts, market intelligence, skills development, and structured engagement with EU institutions. The platform also commits to advancing the goals outlined in theManifesto for a Competitive European Additive Manufacturing Sector, which frames Europe’s ambition to become a global leader in AM technology deployment.
“From an industrial perspective, additive manufacturing has become a strategic technology for Europe’s competitiveness, resilience and capacity to innovate. Through AM-Europe, we want to create a stronger and more coordinated European platform that brings together the AM ecosystem, supports closer dialogue with policymakers, and helps ensure that companies have the right framework conditions to develop, invest and scale. Europe has the expertise and industrial base to lead in additive manufacturing, let’s work together within AM-Europe to make this happen,” said Virgilio García, Chairman of AM-Europe.
Source: 3D Printing Industry
