Quick Summary
Additional Context
Additive manufacturing suppliers have competed on technology for most of the past two decades. Laser count, build volume, build rate, and process monitoring defined the pitch, and for a long time these were a reasonable proxy for customer value. Between 2020 and 2025, the ground under that logic shifted. This article examines what the equipment revenue numbers reveal about the industry’s competitive structure and why they raise a strategic question that most Western suppliers have yet to answer.
Five years of equipment revenue
Global revenue from metal and polymer AM equipment grew by 41 percent between 2020 and 2025. The distribution of that growth is the actual story. Chinese suppliers moved from roughly 10 percent of global equipment revenue to 26 percent. US-based suppliers went the