A bright future

As the business continues to grow, Fulop projects that two dozen Production Systems will be shipped in 2019.A lot of Desktop Metal’s customers are looking to buy multiple systems to print more than 100,000 parts per hour as orders come in.

However, it is still unknown how much mainstream metal processing will be affected by 3-D printing in the near future.When it comes to producing relatively straightforward parts in large quantities, traditional manufacturing techniques like casting do have their advantages.

Hart acknowledges, “When people say that 3-D printing will be 20 or 40 percent of manufacturing in some number of decades, I think, “Probably not,” and then “It’s too early to tell.”Despite this, I am confident that the additive manufacturing industry will expand by ten to one hundred times in the next five to ten years.