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In December, Desktop Metal—the billionaire-backed 3D-printer maker—SPAC’d at a $2.5 billion valuation, with plans to use its newfound $$ to begin consolidating the additive manufacturing industry.
Spoiler alert: It did. On Friday, the company announced its acquisition of ExOne, another 3D-printing company, for ~$561 million.
Why this is big
For a while, Desktop Metal had a gap in its 3D-printer offerings. For the most part, clients could order for large-scale jobs (i.e., printers that could handle hundreds of thousands of parts) or small-scale (printers that could handle hundreds of parts).
The ExOne merger helps fill in those gaps by giving the company in-between solutions on pricing, throughput, and more, meaning the company can now offer a wider spectrum of printers that can work with any quantity of parts.
- The extra staff and resources could help bring costs down and quality up, Arjun Aggarwal, Desktop Metal’s chief product officer, told Emerging Tech Brew.
“Instead of having solutions at bookends and in the middle, we...can much more granularly address application needs,” Aggarwal said. “I have a printer that’s great for hundreds of parts, and it costs X; I have printers that are great for thousands of parts, and cost Y; I have printers that are great for hundreds of thousands of parts, and cost Z. No matter what your application is, whatever material you need, whatever quantity of parts you want...we have got a solution.”
So metal right now: Pre-acquisition, the materials science teams at both Desktop Metal and ExOne were already working on offering new materials to customers, like titanium (e.g., for use in medical equipment or aerospace) or copper (e.g., for use in electronics or automotive). Aggarwal said the merger could help speed those efforts along.
Big picture
For a while, the adoption of 3D-printing tech lagged behind the hype. But the industry has been expanding—with an average ~27% annual growth over the past decade, pre-pandemic—and reached about $12.8 billion worldwide in 2020. Though Desktop Metal started out associated with heavy industry and automakers, it’s now expanded its clientele into consumer electronics, sporting goods, and surgical tooling, as well as into automotive, aerospace, and defense.
And persistent supply-chain issues (hello, holiday gift-order backups) could cause even more interest in the space, since Desktop Metal has said its systems are 100 times faster than legacy options.