3D Systems Corporation (‘3D Systems’) provides comprehensive 3D printing and digital manufacturing solutions, including 3D printers for plastics and metals, materials, software, and services, including maintenance, advanced manufacturing and applications engineering.
The company markets its products and services through subsidiaries in North America and South America (‘Americas’), Europe and the Middle East (‘EMEA’), and Asia Pacific and Oceania (‘APAC’). The company’s solutions support advance...
3D Systems Corporation (‘3D Systems’) provides comprehensive 3D printing and digital manufacturing solutions, including 3D printers for plastics and metals, materials, software, and services, including maintenance, advanced manufacturing and applications engineering.
The company markets its products and services through subsidiaries in North America and South America (‘Americas’), Europe and the Middle East (‘EMEA’), and Asia Pacific and Oceania (‘APAC’). 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).
Business Strategy
The company's business strategies include accelerating additive manufacturing adoption and investing in regenerative medicine.
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 its solutions-oriented strategy, the company 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 augments and complements its portfolio of engineered materials with materials that it purchases or develops 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 optimal cost and performance results.
As part of the company’s solutions approach, its 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.
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. The company also offers 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. The outcome is the ability to improve the quality of prints, optimize design structure, shorten design-to-manufacturing lead time, and minimize manufacturing costs.
Since the acquisition of Oqton, Inc. (‘Oqton’) in 2021, the company has also offered an intelligent, cloud-based ‘manufacturing operating system’ (‘MOS’) platform to customers that need to integrate a broad range of advanced manufacturing and automation technologies, including additive manufacturing solutions, in their production workflows. Many of the company’s legacy stand-alone software applications are integrated 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.
In December 2024, the company entered into a definitive agreement for the sale of its Geomagic software business to Hexagon AB, subject to customary adjustments. The divestiture of Geomagic is expected to be completed by the end of the second quarter of 2025, subject to the satisfaction of certain closing conditions. Geomagic represents only a portion of the company’s broader software business, and its products primarily consist of reverse engineering, design, and inspection software. Following the sale of Geomagic, the company’s remaining software business and continued investment and development efforts will primarily focus on software solutions and platforms that accelerate the adoption of 3D printing technologies in large-scale, production application environments. These software platforms specifically include 3D Sprint, 3DXpert, which are core to the company’s metal and polymer additive manufacturing solutions, and Oqton Industrial Manufacturing OS, which helps customers move from prototyping to a repeatable and high-quality production additive manufacturing process. Through these platforms, the company will continue to offer software solutions for design, build preparation simulation, automation of repetitive tasks, inspection, preparing and optimizing CAD and polygon data, increasingly leveraging the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning to drive efficiency, improved workflows, higher productivity, repeatability, and quality.
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, it 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, and are priced accordingly. One entitlement of its service contracts is that 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 its 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, it has discontinued upgrade support and maintenance agreements for certain of its older legacy printers.
Advanced Manufacturing
As part of the company’s strategy to help customers adopt additive manufacturing, it 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 the company’s 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 and 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 include 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, it 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 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 markets its products and services in those areas.
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 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. For the year ended December 31, 2024, one customer accounted for approximately 16% of the company’s consolidated revenue. The company expects to maintain its relationship with this customer.
Seasonality
Historically, the company’s results of operations have been subject to seasonal factors. Stronger demand for its products has historically occurred in its fourth quarter (year ended December 31, 2024), primarily due to its customers’ capital expenditure budget cycles and its sales compensation incentive programs. The company’s first and third quarters have historically been its weakest quarters for overall unit demand. The first quarter has typically been a slow quarter for capital expenditures in general.
Research and Development
The company’s research and development expense for the year ended December 31, 2024, decreased to $86.5 million.
Intellectual Property
As of December 31, 2024, the company held 1,247 patents worldwide. As of December 31, 2024, it had 300 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.
History
3D Systems Corporation was founded in 1986. The company was incorporated in Delaware in 1993.
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