The story of 3D printing has long since moved beyond plastic toys and novelty objects. Over the past several years, the technology has quietly reshaped major industries from within. Fuel nozzles for aircraft engines are being printed. Humanoid robot joints and foldable-phone hinges are being manufactured through additive processes. Even customized ceramic dental crowns can now be made layer by layer.
According to the Wohlers Report 2026, published by Wohlers Associates under ASTM International, the global 3D-printing, or additive-manufacturing, industry reached $24.2 billion in 2025, up 10.9% from the previous year.
More important than the headline figure is the industry’s changing structure. Revenue from printing services is growing several times faster than equipment sales. The center of value is shifting—from selling machines to delivering finished products, and from laboratory demonstrations to production lines.
At this inflection point, where do five representative companies—spanning the three major material categories of metal, polymer and ceramic—stand? Drawing on listed-company filings, authoritative industry reports and publicly available information, this article examines their technology paths and commercial progress.
From Prototyping to Mass Production: A $24.2 Billion Industry at a Turning Point
First, a basic distinction is worth clarifying. The formal industry term for 3D printing is additive manufacturing.
Traditional manufacturing is largely subtractive: excess material is cut away from a block to create a part. Additive manufacturing takes the opposite approach, building an object layer by layer. This offers two defining advantages: even highly complex structures can be produced as a single integrated component, and customized parts can be made without tooling—even in quantities of one.
For nearly four decades, the technology was used primarily for prototyping, helping engineers validate designs quickly. That is now changing.
The Wohlers Report indicates that additive-manufacturing services already account for 48% of the industry’s total revenue, well above the share generated by equipment sales. The shift is particularly visible among leading Chinese metal-additive-manufacturing companies. Their 2025 annual reports show that revenue from customized printed products and technical services has exceeded equipment sales for several consecutive years.
An even more telling milestone came when their industrial-sector revenue—RMB 894 million—surpassed the aerospace revenue of RMB 883 million for the first time. Demand is spreading beyond high-end applications such as rockets and satellites into civilian, higher-volume markets, including smartphone hinges, automotive brake calipers and humanoid robots.
The journey from prototype to production provides a common benchmark for evaluating the five companies profiled below.
GE Aerospace: Turning “Impossible” Parts into Flight-Ready Components
One of the most iconic examples of 3D printing in mass production is GE’s aircraft-engine fuel nozzle.
About the size of a walnut, the metal component contains labyrinthine internal channels for mixing fuel. Its complexity made it nearly impossible to manufacture using conventional methods.
GE solved the problem with laser powder bed fusion, or LPBF. High-energy lasers fuse metal powder layer by layer. A nozzle that once required the welding and assembly of 20 separate parts can now be printed as a single component—cutting weight by 25% and increasing durability fivefold.
According to GE Aerospace, its additive-manufacturing facility in Auburn, Alabama, produces approximately 600 fuel nozzles a week. By 2024, cumulative deliveries had exceeded 140,000 units.
On GE’s Catalyst turboprop engine, additive manufacturing also reduced 855 individual parts to just 12 integrated components.
GE’s approach points to a broader lesson: the greatest value in metal 3D printing does not necessarily lie with companies that sell printers. It lies with the companies that use the technology to rethink the part itself—and that control the underlying materials data, process know-how and airworthiness-certification capabilities.
EOS: The Race to Make Metal Printing Faster and Cheaper
GE demonstrated that additive manufacturing could produce parts once considered impossible. Germany’s EOS is tackling the next question: how to make those parts faster, cheaper and at greater scale.
A pioneer in laser powder bed fusion, EOS unveiled its next-generation flagship system, the M4 ONYX, at Formnext in Frankfurt in November 2025.
The system offers a 450 × 450 × 400 mm build volume and uses six synchronized 400-watt lasers. Compared with its predecessor, it increases productivity by 50% and can reduce the cost per part by as much as 30%. Its powder-recycling rate exceeds 90%, while integrated defect-detection technology can cut the manual quality-inspection workload by nearly half.
The system entered commercial operation in the first quarter of 2026.
EOS’s customer base also reflects where demand for metal additive manufacturing is heading. U.S. rocket-engine company Ursa Major has selected EOS equipment to expand production of critical defense components. NASA, meanwhile, is working with EOS on training programs for metal 3D-printing engineers.
Competition among equipment makers is no longer about the performance of a single machine alone. It now extends to production-line automation, software ecosystems and even the standards used to train the industry’s workforce.
Thales: A Chinese Case Study in Ceramic Inkjet Printing
Of the five companies, Hangzhou Thales Medical Technology is one of the more recent entrants. Its business is not small, however, and its focus is unusually specialized: ceramic 3D printing.
Zirconia is among the most advanced materials used in dental restorations. But it is also brittle and difficult to process. For years, zirconia crowns were either milled from solid blocks or produced using stereolithography, a method with relatively limited precision.
Austria-based Lithoz is a leading example of the stereolithography route. Based on the latest publicly available data through 2022, it has been ranked by industry research firm VoxelMatters as the global leader in ceramic additive manufacturing for several consecutive years.
A more demanding alternative is material jetting: spraying liquid ceramic material, much like ink, to build a part directly. Thales was the first company to complete the full chain—from materials and equipment to process development, regulatory approval and batch-scale personalized production—in the field of inkjet-printed zirconia dental restorations.
The technology originated in aerospace inkjet-forming research. Thales began preliminary research in 2011 and developed its ACJ, or Advance Customized Jetting, technology in 2019.
The principle resembles that of an ordinary inkjet printer, except that the “ink” is a proprietary liquid-zirconia formulation. Tens of thousands of nozzles can eject hundreds of millions of droplets per second, producing layers as thin as 2 to 10 micrometers—roughly one-tenth the diameter of a human hair.
In May 2023, Thales’s additively manufactured customized fixed zirconia dental prosthesis received a Class III medical-device registration certificate from China’s National Medical Products Administration, or NMPA. It was the industry’s first NMPA registration for an additively manufactured dental-restoration product.
A study by a team from Peking University School of Stomatology, published in The Journal of Prosthetic Dentistry, found that full-contour zirconia crowns produced through the jetting process outperformed milled and stereolithography-produced crowns in both dimensional accuracy and marginal fit.
Thales also prints metasurface microstructures directly onto the inner surface of the restoration. Tests showed that these structures increased immediate bond strength by 60%, addressing a persistent challenge for zirconia restorations: weak bonding and the risk of debonding.
The company is moving beyond the laboratory. Its smart manufacturing center in Hangzhou covers more than 10,000 square meters, and a single production line can produce more than 1,000 customized medical devices a day. Its “Thales Cloud” AI enables adaptive design and flexible manufacturing.
Competition, however, is intensifying. Since 2024, companies including Chongqing Xikema and Zhuhai MoFang Precision have also obtained NMPA Class III registration approvals for 3D-printed zirconia materials.
HP: Bringing 3D Printing into the Era of Scaled Manufacturing
HP is the only cross-industry entrant among the five companies.
In 2016, the company best known for its inkjet printers brought its expertise in precision fluid delivery into the three-dimensional world. Its process selectively jets a fusing agent onto nylon powder, after which heat fuses the treated powder into high-strength polymer parts layer by layer.
The technology is known as Multi Jet Fusion, or MJF.
A decade on, MJF has become one of the leading processes for the batch production of polymer parts. At the RAPID + TCT show in April 2026, HP announced a further 20% increase in production capacity for its core Jet Fusion 5600 series. It also introduced the compact MJF 1200, bringing industrial-grade additive manufacturing into smaller production spaces.
HP’s strategy reflects the platform logic of the IT industry.
On one side, the company is working with chemical producers including BASF and Evonik to build an open materials ecosystem. The reuse rate of its bio-based powder has reached 80%, helping lower the cost per part.
On the other hand, HP has created an “additive-manufacturing network” that distributes orders to partner factories around the world, while the company retains control over the platform and production standards.
From functional components for racing motorcycles to customized orthotics, MJF is targeting genuine production applications—with volumes of 10,000 units or more, rather than one-off prototypes.
Stratasys: An Industry Veteran Adapts to a New Era
Stratasys is one of the industry’s pioneers. Two foundational technologies—fused deposition modeling, or FDM, and PolyJet photopolymer jetting—originated with the company. It remains one of the world’s largest pure-play 3D-printing companies by revenue.
Its 2025 financial results offer a revealing snapshot of the industry’s current condition. Annual revenue totaled $551 million, down modestly from $572 million in 2024.
At the same time, revenue from end-use production applications—not prototyping—rose to 37.5% of total revenue, compared with just 25% in 2020. The company has identified aerospace and defense, automotive tooling, healthcare and dental applications as its four strategic markets.
Stratasys’s position reflects the broader pressures facing the industry. A cooler capital market and cautious customer spending are forcing companies to prove that 3D printing can make economic sense on real production lines.
Dental applications are widely regarded as one of the industry’s most valuable markets. Rival 3D Systems received U.S. Food and Drug Administration clearance for its jet-printed monolithic denture solution in 2024. In April 2026, the solution also obtained certification under the European Union’s Medical Device Regulation and began a full-scale launch in Europe.
Outlook: Distinct Technology Paths, One Race to Scale
The progress of these five companies points to three broader conclusions.
First, no single technology will dominate every application.
Metal printing is primarily based on laser fusion, as demonstrated by GE and EOS.
Polymer printing is more diverse. HP specializes in high-volume production through MJF, while Stratasys has built its business around two foundational technologies, FDM and PolyJet.
Ceramic printing has likewise split into two major paths: stereolithography and inkjet printing, represented here by Lithoz and Thales.
The material determines the process. The depth of application determines where the value lies.
Second, the decisive question is no longer whether a company can print a part, but whether it can produce that part at scale.
GE’s output of 600 fuel nozzles a week, EOS’s six-laser productivity race and Thales’s production lines capable of making more than 1,000 customized dental restorations a day all point in the same direction.
The companies most likely to survive the industry’s cycles will be those that can move into real production environments—and make the economics work.
Third, the industry’s center of gravity is shifting eastward.
The Wohlers Report shows that corporate revenue in the Asia-Pacific region grew 19.8% in 2025, roughly twice Europe’s 9% growth rate.
For decades, most new technologies and materials in modern dental restoration originated in Europe and the United States. In the next phase of industrial transformation, however, the “first regulatory approval” and the “first mass-production line” are increasingly likely to bear the names of Chinese companies.