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When I first travelled to Formnext Shenzhen in 2023 I saw a familiar pattern, the show tells you what China’s additive-manufacturing industry wants to sell. Go outside the show and you can start finding out what is actually being made.
At Huafast’s Shenzhen operation, 5,600 Bambu Lab machines form part of a 15,000-printer production network. But buying the machines is the easy part. The harder problem is managing the labour, materials, orders and commercial pressures that come with manufacturing at scale.
The printers at Huafast are arranged in rows, but the business is organised around deadlines. During a visit to its Shenzhen operation in August, I toured the familiar equipment of desktop 3D printing alongside the less photogenic requirements of manufacturing: finance, administration,