Metal AM Shifts from Prototypes to Production

Despite current challenges facing the metal additive market, SmarTech Analysis (Crozet, VA) expects that metal additive manufacturing will continue to gradually amass more and more production-oriented business cases, resulting in hundreds of billions of dollars in impact to the global manufacturing market over the next decade. In fact, they project metal AM to generate $228 billion worth of components over the coming decade.

Their new analysis model addresses the opportunities associated with metal AM production and applications: Using a new detailed analysis methodology comprising metal additive technology adoption metrics and dynamics already tracked by other SmarTech analysis services, this latest report provides critical insight into the industries and applications which are currently driving metal AM during its fledging years, and expectations for what business cases and areas of application will grow to the largest future opportunities:

• Excluding metal AM in the dental applications, the rest of the metal AM industry is expected to shift from a prototyping-dominant technology to a production component dominant industry by the end of 2022. The burgeoning bound-metal printing technology market will continue to drive notable growth in prototyping for metal components thanks to a lower cost structure and highly accessible systems, but ultimately production applications will account for 60 percent of market value from all produced components annually by the end of the forecast period.

• Several trends are expected to impact the production structure of metal additive technologies over the coming decade. These include most significantly efforts in design for additive manufacturing, with designers consolidating assemblies into fewer parts which can only be produced by additive manufacturing. Also, efficiency and production-cost improvements of the individual technologies are slowly being realized through scalable deployments and efficient material handling and post processing. Across all technologies, markets, and applications, SmarTech anticipates that production costs associated with use of metal AM will fall 40 percent on average per-part by the end of the forecast period, despite part consolidation and performance trends.

www.smartechanalysis.com