Automotive Additive Manufacturing Market to Reach $5.3 Billion by 2023

Forming die created with Sciaky's EBAM technology. (Image courtesy of Sciaky.)

Industry analyst firm SmarTech Publishing has issued a new report entitled “Additive Manufacturing in Automotive 2018” that examines the current market for automotive additive manufacturing, including prototyping and tooling applications, but focusing specifically on production of final parts.

In the new report, SmarTech expects the overall automotive additive manufacturing market to reach $5.3 billion USD in revenues in 2023 and grow to $12.4 billion US by 2028.

According to the report, the adoption of AM by the automotive segment for production purposes is going to mark an inflection point for additive manufacturing.

(Image courtesy of SmarTech Publishing.)

While the market remains focused on prototyping and tooling, parts production will become the primary revenue opportunity by the end of the forecast period, surpassing prototyping, tooling, hardware and materials.

Parts production including metal and polymer parts produced both internally by automotive OEM’s and in outsourcing. These are expected to be the primary revenue opportunity for the automotive additive manufacturing market driving the entire segment, totaling nearly $4.3 billion by the end of the forecast period.

The report also cites new hardware from leading 3D printing vendors and its applicability to automotive part production: multi-jet fusion (HP), digital light synthesis (Carbon) as well as metal binder jetting projects from Desktop Metal, GE Additive and Stratasys.

According to the report, major automotive OEMs have already formed partnerships with AM hardware OEMs with an emphasis on part production, which indicates the value they see from integrating additive manufacturing into their processes.

Moreover, new software is enabling both optimized part design for AM and AM integration into the end-to-end production workflow.

The full report can be found here.