The Evolution of 3D Printing: Breaking through the Boundaries of Imagination and Drawing Intelligent Manufacturing for the Future

From rockets, airplanes, cars, and national treasures to food, toys, sneakers, and cells... 3D printing (also known as "additive manufacturing") technology is constantly expanding the boundaries of human imagination.
Currently, the expansion momentum of the 3D printing industry is strong. According to data from the National Bureau of Statistics, as of the end of the third quarter this year, China's production of 3D printing equipment has achieved double-digit year-on-year growth. According to a report released by the China Business Industry Research Institute, it is expected that by 2025, the size of China's 3D printing market will exceed 63 billion yuan, achieving a 30 fold growth in the past 10 years. At the same time, the application scenarios of 3D printing are constantly expanding and deepening, continuously empowering the high-quality integration of the real economy and the digital economy, and becoming one of the important driving forces for cultivating new quality productivity in China.
How has China's manufacturing technology evolved from traditional forging and cutting to the current state where everything can be "printed"? Recently, reporters from Securities Daily conducted in-depth research on multiple industry chain enterprises to explore the evolutionary path of 3D printing technology.
Presenting three new features
3D printing technology is a technology that manufactures solid parts by adding materials layer by layer based on 3D modeling, and is an important component of high-end manufacturing.
China has always attached great importance to the development of the 3D printing industry and promoted its deepening and realization. In 2015, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and three other ministries issued the "National Additive Manufacturing Industry Development Promotion Plan (2015-2016)", which proposed accelerating the development of additive manufacturing technology and forming an industrial scale as soon as possible, which is of great significance for promoting the transformation and upgrading of China's manufacturing industry. The Guiding Catalogue for Industrial Structure Adjustment (2024 Edition), which will come into effect on February 1, 2024, clearly encourages the development of additive manufacturing equipment and specialized materials.
Meanwhile, data from the National Standard Information Public Service Platform shows that four national standards for additive manufacturing will come into effect on January 1, 2025.
Since the beginning of this year, the production and sales data related to China's 3D printing industry have maintained strong growth. According to data from the National Bureau of Statistics, the production of 3D printing equipment products in China increased by 25.4% year-on-year in the first three quarters of 2024. According to statistics from the General Administration of Customs, the total export value of 3D printers in China reached 6.33 billion yuan (excluding parts) in the first three quarters of 2024, surpassing the total amount of last year.
At present, China has achieved significant breakthroughs in technologies such as continuous fiber 3D printing, multi material printing, and nanoscale printing, reaching the world's advanced level, and new materials tailored specifically for 3D printing are also accelerating development and certification.
Compared with traditional manufacturing technologies such as mold forming, 3D printing simplifies the production process, enables one-step forming of complex structures, and greatly saves manufacturing time and required raw materials. "Chen Yixin, Consulting Director of Zhuoshi Enterprise Management Consulting (Shanghai) Co., Ltd., told Securities Daily reporters that currently, China's 3D printing technology is no longer inferior to international leading technologies.
With the continuous advancement of technology, 3D printing applications are flourishing, and more and more ideas are moving from drawings to reality. For example, in high-end manufacturing fields such as aerospace, 3D printing technology has transitioned from "optional" to "mandatory".
In 2023, the world's first "3D printed rocket" will be ignited and launched, with 85% of its materials completed by 3D printing. Seemingly unimaginable, in fact, our country has already been practicing it. According to data from Zhongyan Puhua Industrial Research Institute, China is one of the main concentration areas of the global aerospace 3D printing market. Aerospace 3D printing technology is expanding into niche fields such as sky exploration, satellite communication, and unmanned aerial vehicles.
Zhang Hongyu, Secretary of the Board of Directors of Shenzhen Guangyunda Optoelectronics Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Guangyunda"), which focuses on aviation manufacturing, told Securities Daily reporters that 3D printing of aviation components has high design flexibility and strong ability to manufacture complex structures. It can directly produce complex shapes or components with complex internal structures that are difficult to achieve with traditional processing methods, and can also achieve lightweight design.
In addition to aerospace, 3D printing also has many application scenarios in fields such as automotive manufacturing and biomedicine, and through integration with artificial intelligence, it can achieve "landing" on the production end.
3D printing technology can already achieve integrated hollow printing. For example, in the automotive manufacturing industry, precision chassis components can be fine tuned and mass-produced in modeling, significantly reducing costs Cui Jiannan, founder and CEO of Guangzhou Zaozaozhen Cultural Technology Co., Ltd., told Securities Daily reporters.
In the field of regenerative medicine, small 3D printers can even create "cells". Liu Zhiyuan, the person in charge of Shenzhen Signo Biotechnology Co., Ltd., revealed to Securities Daily reporters that the 3D printing equipment for organoids equipped with the company's technology has been put into laboratory trials and is expected to play a huge role in drug screening and organ repair in the future.
Currently, the development of China's 3D printing industry presents three new characteristics, namely fast technological breakthroughs, wide applications, and strong integration. Xu Fanglei, founder of Beijing Skylight Technology Co., Ltd., said in an interview with Securities Daily that the market's demand for high-performance and rapid prototyping is increasing day by day, which will bring huge industrial development space and attract more "players" to enter the market.
It can be said that China's 3D printing industry has entered a period of rapid growth, and a "transformation" of the manufacturing industry is unfolding.
Industry chain financing is busy expanding production
With the rapid application of metal 3D printing technologies such as titanium alloys in consumer electronics and other fields, leading domestic 3D printing industry enterprises have also ushered in a "spring" of rising orders.
Since the beginning of this year, leading companies in the domestic 3D printing industry such as Hunan Huashu High tech Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Huashu High tech") and Xi'an Bolite Additive Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Bolite") have seen a significant increase in product orders. At the same time, the reporter also learned through research that multiple companies have expressed optimism about the industry's prospects for 2025.
Cui Jingshu, Secretary of the Board of Directors of Bolite, stated that the company currently has sufficient orders, orderly production and operation, and is making every effort to promote project delivery. It is expected that downstream demand in the industrial chain will continue to increase next year.
With the continuous growth of upstream materials and equipment, as well as downstream applications, several leading 3D printing companies also consider expanding production capacity as their top priority. Among them, Bolite is significantly expanding its production line for customized metal 3D printing products; The Huashu High tech Additive Manufacturing Equipment Expansion Project has also been officially launched, with a first phase investment of approximately 600 million yuan.
The company is continuously improving its algorithms to meet the industry's demand for high-precision mass production, and is using its own industrial grade additive manufacturing equipment as the backbone to continue key technological breakthroughs, "said Liu Yizhan, Secretary of the Board of Directors of Huashu High tech.
From the perspective of industry development trends, 3D printing technology has surpassed the "0-1" stage and entered a period of rapid development. There is still huge room for localization and penetration rate. Once mass production is achieved in a new field, it is expected to further break the industry ceiling.
According to the prediction of Shenzhen Zhongyan Puhua Industry Research Institute Co., Ltd., the size of China's 3D printing market will reach 41.5 billion yuan by 2024. At the same time, China's 3D printing equipment is accelerating its "going global".
The vigorous development of the industrial chain has also attracted the favor of many capital. Since the beginning of this year, the total investment and financing scale in China's 3D printing field has exceeded 1.5 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 40%, and the market value of many enterprises has repeatedly reached new highs. Among them, the enthusiasm for industry level equity investment and financing is soaring. Xiaomi Technology Co., Ltd., Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd., and others have chosen to enter the 3D printing industry.
The Securities Daily reporter further reviewed the announcements of listed companies in the 3D printing sector and found that more than 30% of the companies are in the expansion stage. In financing events, Series A events account for about 40% of the total, while angel/seed round financing events account for about 32%. At the same time, multiple companies have actively joined the capitalization "queue" for financing and expansion after growing and expanding, and the industry as a whole has entered the stage of industrial and financial scale.
Facing the troubles of growth directly
Behind the endless scenery, the 3D printing industry is also facing growth challenges. Material limitations, slow printing speeds, high costs, difficulty in controlling quality and strength, and inadequate industry standards and certifications are becoming bottlenecks in the development of the industry.
Xu Fanglei stated that the types of high-performance materials currently available for 3D printing are relatively limited, and the printing speed is relatively slow, resulting in high printing costs, which limits their application in large-scale production. However, the application of this technology in aerospace and medical fields still lacks a unified industry standard and certification system.
In addition, due to high technological barriers and large capital investment, the concentration of China's 3D printing industry has long been low. According to data from the Forward looking Industry Research Institute, there are nearly 200 enterprises in China's 3D printing industry above a certain scale, but most of them are small and medium-sized enterprises with relatively weak research and development capabilities.
Li Gang, a researcher at the Institute of Industrial Economics of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said frankly, "We need to strengthen overall planning and policy guidance, create backbone 3D printing enterprises, support small and medium-sized enterprises, continuously strengthen independent innovation of enterprises, and build a technology innovation system with enterprises as the main body. At the same time, we should also strengthen chain supplementation and cultivate industrial clusters
Faced with challenges, the industrial chain is actively "breaking through". Taking Shenzhen Jialichuang Technology Group Co., Ltd., an electronic industry enterprise, as an example, the company is improving various mainstream 3D molding technologies and laying out surface treatment processes such as precision grinding to ensure high-quality output.
Bolite is reducing costs and improving efficiency by optimizing printing algorithms, developing new materials, and improving the production efficiency of molds, "said Cui Jingshu.
It is worth mentioning that many places in China have already increased their efforts to develop the 3D printing industry. For example, the "Action Plan for Cultivating a Billion level Additive Manufacturing Industry Innovation Cluster in Shaanxi Province" issued in April this year further clarified the "roadmap" for the development of the province's additive manufacturing industry chain.
Regarding the future of the industry, Song Jia, Deputy Secretary General of the China United Nations Procurement Promotion Association, stated in an interview with Securities Daily that "policy, capital, and application resonance will further ensure the quality and safety of 3D printing, help the entire industry move towards standardization and specialization, and occupy the 'innovation highland' globally, paving the way for a 'new future' of intelligent manufacturing in China
Source: Securities Daily