Between March and May 2022, CECIMO, the European Association of the Machine Tool Industries and related Manufacturing Technologies, organized the fourth round of its European Additive Manufacturing Survey. This survey aims to assess key market trends in the Additive Manufacturing (AM) sector.

Launched by CECIMO, in cooperation with European national associations, this 6 month survey enables the collection of quality data directly from industry which contributes towards a European overview of the main trends in the AM market. It highlights trends in key business areas such as domestic business, AM exports, orders by material type, client industry demand and investment trend. In the UK, AM-UK alongside the Manufacturing Technologies Association are responsible for collecting the data for this report.

This fourth round report is split into two parts, as this is the first survey that has included results from a separate German survey;  the results of that are not available but have been included in the overall analysis in part 1.  The second part of the survey continues the time series that we had established through the three previous editions of this survey and exclude the German results to give a more accurate comparison with those earlier reports.

The overall outlook is one of strong positive expectations in both the home and export markets over the next 6 months.  There are also strong investment intentions indicated by the respondents which leads to a new high for the AM Confidence Index.

There are similar results for the UK part of the survey.

• This showed strong growth in all four aspects of the industry in both the home and export market;  AM products had the strongest balances in the home market but the weakest for exports where AM services and AM machines were the strongest.
• By material type, plastics had the strongest balances in the UK, although with a limited response, while metals was the weakest, although we must emphasise that it still had a strong positive balance.
• UK respondents expected strong growth in orders for the aerospace, automotive, machinery and medical industries.
• Investment expectations were also strong and the overall AM Confidence Index for the UK was 83.3;  this is above that for the survey as a whole (69.5).

The full report can be found through the link below: