Not obvious that Yoav Zeif would open by thanking the audience for braving the New York snow and market turbulence to reach this year’sAMS event*, but that was his starting point. “Another challenging year in the industry. I don’t know if you felt it. I felt it,” theStratasyschief executive said, before arguing that quarterly volatility has obscured longer-term progress.
Industrial hardware sales have declined year on year for two to three years, a trend he linked to the shift in interest rates from near zero to 5 or 6 per cent and broader macroeconomic uncertainty. With equipment purchases in capital-intensive sectors sensitive to financing costs, Additive manufacturing has not been spared.
Stratasys tracks customer sentiment through sales-cycle length. “We can see for the last two quarters that the sales cycles are improving, still very long, much longer than the post-Covid or before the Covid, the pre-Covid, but improving, which is a great sign.” Orders remain slow to close, but the direction of travel and theeconomic outlook for the 3D printing industryhave changed.
Zeif places the downturn within a conventional capital goods cycle. Heavy B2B industries typically move in three to four-year waves, he said, as customers purchase equipment, integrate it, validate returns, and then pause before the next round of investment. Semiconductor manufacturing equipment provides a parallel.
In his view, additive is not an outlier. Stratasys compared the3D printing industry’s revenue ramp with digital printing, drones, CNC machining and solar panels. On a timeline measured from technological inception to sustained growth, additive sits within a familiar adoption arc. “It takes years to adopt new technologies, especially industrial technology, manufacturing technology.”
CNC offers the closest comparison. Invented in the 1950s, it saw limited uptake until the late 1970s, with broad industrial penetration arriving in the 1990s. Controllers improved, computing costs fell, standards matured, and CAD systems advanced. Programming became accessible. Over roughly four decades, barriers were removed sequentially. “We need to remove the barriers [in 3D printing],” argued Zeif. Early CNC machines were bulky and unfamiliar. User interfaces were poor. Tooling ecosystems were immature. Once those constraints eased, the technology moved into the mainstream.
The pattern echoes theinstitutional filtering phase of an industrial technology cycle. Early enthusiasm gives way to procurement scrutiny, qualification requirements, and integration with established workflows.
Within additive itself, the more immediate disruption has come from the low end.Desktop systems have expanded rapidlyover the past three to four years, with growth seen in both high and lower-end 3D printing systems, while the mid-range has suffered. While the shift has unsettled some incumbents, Zeif calls it a gift.
Low-cost, low-requirement machines drive awareness, skill development, and experimentation. They are “good enough, easy to use” for rapid prototyping and entry-level applications. High-end systems, by contrast, serve aerospace-certified parts and other demanding use cases where reliability, performance, cybersecurity, workflow integration, and standardisation are prerequisites.
Between these poles lies a middle ground, such as tooling, where higher performance is needed, but perfection is not. Competitive pressure is most intense there.
Source: 3D Printing Industry
