3D Systems Profile
3D Systems Corporation provides comprehensive 3D printing and digital manufacturing solutions, including 3D printers for plastics, metals, wax and bioinks, materials, software, advanced manufacturing services and digital design tools.
The company’s solutions support advanced applications in two key industry verticals: Healthcare Solutions (which includes dental, medical devices, personalized health services and regenerative medicine) and Industrial Solutions (which includes aerospace, defense, transportation and general manufacturing).
The company markets its products and services through subsidiaries in North America and South America (collectively referred to as ‘Americas’), Europe and the Middle East (collectively referred to as ‘EMEA’) and the Asia Pacific and Oceania region (collectively referred to as ‘APAC’).
Products
The company offers its customers a comprehensive range of 3D printers, materials, software, and digital design tools.
3D Printers and Materials
The company’s 3D printers transform digital data input generated by 3D design software, Computer Aided Design (CAD) software or other 3D design tools, into printed parts using several unique print engines that employ proprietary, additive layer by layer building processes with a variety of materials. As part of the company’s solutions-oriented strategy, it offers a broad range of 3D printing technologies, including Stereolithography (SLA), Selective Laser Sintering, Direct Metal Printing, MultiJet Printing, ColorJet Printing, polymer extrusion, and extrusion and SLA based bioprinting. The company’s printers utilize a wide range of materials, the majority of which are proprietary materials that it develops, blends, and markets. The company’s comprehensive range of materials includes plastic, nylon, metal, composite, elastomeric, wax, polymeric dental materials and biocompatible materials. The company’s augment and complement its portfolio of engineered materials with materials that it purchases or develop with third parties under private label and distribution arrangements.
The company works closely with its customers to optimize the performance of its materials in their applications. The company’s expertise in materials science and formulation, combined with its processes, software and equipment, enables it to provide unique solutions and help its customers select the material that best meets their needs with performance results.
As part of its solutions approach, the company’s offered printers, with the exception of direct metal printers and bioprinters, have built-in intelligence to make them integrated, closed systems. For these integrated printers, the company furnishes materials specifically designed for use in those printers, which are packaged in smart cartridges and utilize material delivery systems. These integrated materials are designed to enhance system functionality, productivity, reliability and materials' shelf life, in addition to providing its customers with a built-in quality management system and a fully integrated workflow solution.
For its bio-printing solutions, the company also offers research protocols that include bio-ink, consumable and reagent recommendations. These protocols cover pre-print preparation of cells and biomaterials, 3D printing parameter setting, and post-print processes. The company’s protocols are utilized by research organizations to run experiments, share research findings, and enhance the utilization of its bioprinters.
Software and Related Products
The company provides digital design tools, including software, scanners and haptic devices. It offers solutions for product design, simulation, mold and die design, 3D scan-to-print, reverse engineering, production machining, metrology, inspection and manufacturing workflows. These products are designed to enable a seamless workflow for customers and are marketed under brand names, such as Geomagic. The company also offers 3D Sprint and 3DXpert, proprietary software to prepare and optimize CAD data and manage the additive manufacturing processes. These software products provide automated support building and placement, build platform management, print simulation and print queue management capabilities.
Since the acquisition of Oqton, Inc. (Oqton) in 2021, the company has also offered an intelligent, cloud-based MOS platform to customers that need to integrate a broad range of advanced manufacturing and automation technologies, including additive manufacturing (AM) solutions, in their production workflows. As part of the company’s broader software strategy, it is working to integrate 3D System’s legacy stand-alone software applications into Oqton’s legacy MOS, so that it can offer its customers a complete cloud-based software solution to automate and control their entire digital manufacturing process from order to delivery.
For its bioprinters, the company offers Bioprint Pro as a software solution that allows researchers to design and bioprint repeatable experiments. Bioprint Pro includes experiment-based workflows, basic CAD modeling, and optimized biomaterial presets.
Services
Maintenance and Training Services
The company provides a variety of customer services, local application support and field support on a worldwide basis for its products, including installation of new printers at customers’ sites, maintenance agreements, periodic hardware upgrades and software updates. The company also provides services to assist its customers and partners in developing new applications for its technologies to facilitate the use of its technology for specific applications, to train customers on the use of its printers and to maintain its printers at customers’ sites. The company provides these services, spare parts and field support either directly or through a network of reseller partners. The company employs customer-support sales engineers to support its worldwide customer base, and it seeks to continue to strengthen and enhance its partner network and service offerings.
The company’s 3D printers are sold with a warranty period ranging from 90 days to one year. After the warranty period, the company generally offers service contracts that enable its customers to continue service and maintenance coverage. These service contracts are offered with various levels of support and options. One entitlement of the company’s service contracts is its service engineers provide regularly scheduled preventive maintenance visits to customer sites. Additionally, the company provides training to its partners to enable them to also perform these services. Another contract entitlement on select printer models is proactive remote troubleshooting capability through the company’s 3DConnect Service IoT platform. From time to time, the company also offers upgrade kits for certain of its printers that enable its existing customers to take advantage of new or enhanced printer capabilities. In some cases, the company has discontinued upgrade support and maintenance agreements for certain of its older legacy printers.
Advanced Manufacturing
As part of its strategy to help customers adopt additive manufacturing, the company offers advanced manufacturing services through facilities in the Americas and EMEA regions. These facilities supplement customer manufacturing environments by allowing them to test and ramp production using its solutions before transitioning production to their environment and also providing them with flexible manufacturing capacity on an as-needed basis. This allows the company to provide application and production expertise and refine the production process as part of its solutions approach. As the process is validated and volumes ramp, customers may choose to move production to their facilities using equipment, materials, software and services that they purchase from the company. These facilities operate under stringent quality systems and are also utilized by customers in regulated industries, such as healthcare and aerospace & defense for sustained outsourced production of hundreds of thousands of parts per year.
Software Services
In addition to the company’s software license products, it offers software maintenance and cloud-software subscriptions, which includes updates and support for its licensed software products. The company’s licensed software is sold with a maintenance service that generally covers a period of one year. After this initial period, the company offers single and multi-year maintenance contracts that enable its customers to continue coverage. These software service contracts typically include free software updates and various levels of technical support. In addition, the company offers Oqton's legacy Manufacturing Operating System (MOS) as a cloud based-manufacturing operating system designed to automate digital production workflows and to enable machine monitoring, end-to-end manufacturing visibility and production traceability. For the company’s cloud subscription solutions, customer support and software updates are included as part of the solution.
Healthcare Solutions Services
As part of the company’s precision healthcare solutions services, it provides surgical planning, modeling, prototyping and manufacturing services. The company offers printing and finishing of medical and dental devices, anatomical models and surgical guides and tools, as well as modeling, design and planning services, including VSP surgical planning solutions.
Global Operations
The company operates in the Americas, EMEA and APAC regions, and market its products and services in those areas, as well as to other parts of the world.
Marketing and Customers
The company’s Go-to-Market strategy focuses on an integrated approach that is directed at providing comprehensive design to manufacturing solutions meeting the broad spectrum of its customer needs. The company utilizes a wide range of marketing tools to generate demand and create awareness for its products and services worldwide. The company’s marketing and communications teams support its demand generation activities by providing marketing campaigns, digital presence and outreach, and event and targeted vertical seminar engagements.
The company promotes and sells its solutions globally through a direct sales force, channel partners and, in certain geographies, appointed distributors. The company’s customer success organization includes sales professionals, application engineers, vertical specialists, and other support teams throughout the Americas, EMEA and APAC regions. These teams are responsible for providing complete service to its customers and channel partners from a technical consultation to the sale of its software, printer, and services products.
The company’s application engineers collaborate closely with its customers to solve complex design and additive manufacturing challenges, leveraging its technology, software, materials and services to develop advanced applications across its Healthcare Solutions and Industrial Solutions segments. Additionally, the company’s Customer Innovation Centers provide access to the resources necessary to develop, validate, and commercialize customer applications.
The company sells its software solutions, including its Oqton MOS software, through a dedicated software sales team. The company’s software may be sold to customers with 3D printing equipment from competitive equipment manufacturers and, in some cases, it resells its software through these manufacturers.
The company’s customers include major companies, as well as small and midsize businesses in a broad range of industries, including medical, dental, automotive, aerospace, durable goods, government, defense, technology, jewelry, electronics, education, consumer goods, energy, biotechnology and others.
Business Strategy
The key elements of the company’s strategy include accelerating additive manufacturing adoption; and investing in regenerative medicine.
As part of the company’s strategy to enable customers to adopt additive manufacturing in production environments, during 2022 the company made a number of targeted investments and entered into partnership arrangements designed to broaden and enhance its product offering of 3D printing solutions and to expand addressable markets for its Industrial Solutions and Healthcare Solutions segments. Among these investments were the acquisitions of Titan Additive LLC (Titan), Kumovis GmbH (Kumovis), and dp polar GmbH (dp polar).
During 2022, the company signed a joint venture agreement with the Saudi Arabian Industrial Investments company (Dussur) with the goal of expanding the use of additive manufacturing within the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and surrounding geographies. The company also acquired a minority ownership interest in Enhatch Inc. (Enhatch) during 2022. As part of this relationship, 3D Systems and Enhatch will incorporate the automation and artificial intelligence capabilities of Enhatch’s Intelligent Surgery Ecosystem into 3D Systems’ proven workflow for patient-specific surgical planning solutions.
The company’s efforts in the area of regenerative medicine consist mainly of pre-commercial research and development (R&D) and involve three strategies.
The first strategy is the use of additive manufacturing for human organ transplantation. The company’s second strategy involves utilizing its bio-printing technology to manufacture non-organ human tissue scaffolds for use in transplantation and surgical reconstruction applications. The company’s third regenerative medicine strategy seeks to utilize its bio-printing capabilities to design and manufacture 3D-printed vascularized ‘organs-on-chips’ for use in drug development by pharmaceutical industry customers.
During 2022, the company formed a new wholly-owned biotech company called Systemic Bio in order to accelerate its progress in this area. Systemic Bio will combine 3D Systems’ legacy expertise in high-resolution 3D printing with advanced capabilities in bioprinting and biomaterials gained from its 2021 acquisition of Allevi, Inc. to design and market 3D-printed, vascularized ‘organs-on-chips’ for sale to pharmaceutical industry customers.
Intellectual Property
As of December 31, 2022, the company held 1,358 patents worldwide. As of December 31, 2022, the company had 360 pending patent applications worldwide. The principal issued patents covering aspects of the company’s various technologies will expire at varying times through the year 2034.
Research and Development
For the year ended December 31, 2022, the company’s research and development expenses were $87.1 million.
History
3D Systems Corporation was founded in 1986. The company was incorporated in Delaware in 1993.
