The business of 3D printers will change dimensions of world trade.

Though the technology of 3D printers has already existed for decades, the big rise in its popularity in the consumer market is relatively new. 

A brief history of 3D printing.

Also known as additive manufacturing, three-dimension printing concept is not as young as it would seem to be. The first prototype of a working 3D printer was created in 1984 by Charles W. Hull of 3D Systems Corp and was used mainly for Rapid Prototyping (RP). It was used by manufacturers to produce prototypes of their products way much faster than before using Computer-Aided Design software. After the design was created manually on the computer, the machines would follow the indications given by the software in order to construct the object using the given materials.

The globalization of the 3D printing market.

Since this technology became mainstream, 3D printers have found their way into a big number of markets. Though the main users of this technology can be found in the field of science and on the automobile and aviation industries. Besides, new players tend to appear such as toys and jewelry industries and different manufacturing companies. Over the past few years, the prices of those printers drastically has decreased. At the present time, it is possible to find some of them under $1000 even on important e-commerce websites such as Amazon. Their popularity since 2010 has skyrocketed and the four current leaders in this market are Stratasys, 3D Systems, Voxeljet and ExOne. 

A big step forward that industry needs to take into account.

The possibilities offered by this technology are incredible. In industry, it could mean that many goods that have relied on the economies of scale of large, centralized plants will be produced locally. Even if the price per-unit goes higher, a reduction of the costs would be made on shipping. In the end, the producting goods could be made using fewer places than before. Besides, given that the process of production is based on the design of the object on the software linked to the printer, changing elements would be easier than before; considering the perspectives of personalization and customization would become almost infinite. The idea that this technology becomes more and more popular every year could lead to a need for retailers, producers, manufacturers and other actors to rethink their economic strategies with a new point of view.

A danger for worldwide workshops?

China, for exemple

has been well known for a long-time now to be known as one of the most attractive workshops on the planet for companies that need to product some goods at low prices. Their strategies were to push the mass-manufacturing model to its limits using an important asset: labor (underpaid and hard-working). Nevertheless, with this technology of 3D printers becoming popular, this could change. On the one hand, if one admits that prices were low enough for companies to produce their goods in China including shipping costs, it appears obvious that using at a large scale 3D printers by companies would be more profitable in the short and long term. On the other hand, it would be impossible for China to reduce the standards of living of their labor force to stay competitive even more. Even if not all companies move their production to 3D printing, it may affect China well enough to make it lose its place as a mass-manufacturing world's powerhouse.

Sébastien T.