TCT Shenzhen
Despite the trepidation from my colleagues both in England and China, I arrived in Shenzhen via boat without any issues (except for not having any change for the bus from the port). Such is my reputation with travel mishaps that the very idea of transferring onto a boat in Hong Kong Airport, where your baggage is collected by the ferry company, caused much guffawing. Now, I may have nearly missed last night’s partner dinner because of a missed alarm but I did make it to today’s inaugural TCT Shenzhen on time.
Walking in, immediately I was stuck by what a swish and polished show this looked, the team from VNU Rapid have transported the professionalism and organisation from the Shanghai event south with aplomb. At the bottom of the escalators you’re greeted by an enormous #TCTShenzhen, made to a standard that surpasses the UK equivalent. Now if you’re searching your western social channels for that hashtag, the majority of it will come from Duncan and myself, but head over to WeChat and you’ll see that it is as buzzy on there as it is on the show floor.
From the moment the doors opened to the very last bell the booths and the aisles where packed with visitors looking to see the latest and greatest in 3D printing technology.
I started my day in the conference listening to Context’s Chris Connery’s excellent summation of the current state of the 3D printing market. Context examine the shipping of 127 3D printing companies and categorize their machines into four; Industrial ($100,000+), Design ($20,000-£100,000) Professional ($2,500-$20,000), and Personal (sub $2,500).
Context estimate that machine sales make up 28% of the $9 Billion 3D printing market and 84% of machines shipped are of the Personal variety. Although that may seem like worrying statistic for an industry so focussed on industrial, the revenues make for much better reading, 67% of machine sales revenue is made up by those $100,000 + Industrial solutions.
Context’s predictions for the future of the machinery sales are healthy, foreseeing one million-unit sales in four years’ time. With Chris suggesting that we’re set to see some growth with newer machinery I decided to head out onto the show floor to see what is new.
A buzzy TCT Shenzhen show floor
As always with China there’s a raft of metal 3D printing technologies but not in the masses we saw at TCT Asia earlier this year. Here in Shenzhen, with the majority of visitors likely to come from the consumer electronics industry, there’s an emphasis on jigs and fixtures and tooling of the polymer variety.
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Exhibit at the UK's definitive and most influential 3D printing and additive manufacturing event, TCT 3Sixty.
Western players like Formlabs, Stratasys, 3D Systems, Ultimaker and HP have become experts in showing these particular applications to visitors. Front and centre is HP’s booth, which has a concentration of its new colour variation of Multi Jet Fusion, but what caught my eye was the 3kg medicine ball on a pendulum being flung into a wall of printed parts, all surviving the impact time after time.
A talk I’d earmarked to attend during the TCT Shenzhen Summit was that of Ami Galperin who is currently the Director of Global Additive Manufacturing at the contact manufacturing giant Flex.
Flex has been relatively quiet on its applications of additive manufacturing but 200,000 employees including 20,000 design engineers, you shouldn’t mistake quietness with a lack of activity. In fact, what Ami demonstrated was that Flex is solving some of additive manufacturing’s most complex problems and bringing the technology to more applications than most other companies combined.
Flex’s mission is to accelerate the adoption of additive manufacturing by identifying use cases, potential applications and opportunities to make a business case for switching to additive manufacturing.
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Some of the use cases Ami was able to share span the complete spectrum of manufacturing adoption from prototypes to jigs & fixtures, and end-use parts (See above gallery). A common theme throughout was cost savings and after his talk Ami told TCT that in contract manufacturing that the margins in contract manufacturing are so slim that every cent matters.
Ami is tasked with fitting additive into the way Flex operates across its global sites by improving performance with part consolidation, toplogical design and part replacement as well as fitting additive into procurement processes.
I had the chance to walk the show floor with Ami, formerly of Stratasys and we spotted some interesting booths including DyeWin whose post-processing technology is similar to that of DyeMansion’s and Revo, whose technology shares some similarities, at least aesthetically with Carbon.
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Revo
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Dyewin
I’ll take a closer look tomorrow.
