News today that GE Aviation has bought 10 Arcam EBM machines, the largest order Arcam has ever received.
Even more important (at least to me) is that the new machines incorporating FASTEBM technology will be coming in 2016.
While as yet I have no hard evidence all of the FASTEBM studies and what Magnus has said in the past indicates that that this new machine will not be an incremental improvement but one at least twice as fast. Maybe more. Added to this is the improvements Arcam will be making into quality and availability of TiAl powder. If this works out as I expect we should see rapid sales increases from 2016 forward .
Arcam is still in it’s infancy both tech wise and sales wise. Still a lot of so far unapplied research paid for by others, including the EU, that will benefit only Arcam in the next few yeas,and a huge patent and trade secret moat. I am not a patent attorney, but I have read most of the patents and they look tight to me.
Sorry no direct confirmatory links - still looking for it.
For me this is a hold for at least 5 years, ignore the general market and the stock price as long as the technology keeps improving.
AMAVF listed in US stock market is lightly traded and volatile, any arbitrage with the main company stock listed in Sweden seems muted.
I didn’t see the FastEBM news but what this order means to me is that we have volume manufacturing production established.
With these machines working round the clock at GE Aviation to crank out the blades the after market for the powder metal supply for ARCAM - assuming they also won the long term supply agreement then this should be massive. It marks the payoff in the atomizer investment and production expansion.
Mauser:- was this the statement you were referring to?
“Avio Aero is moving into series production of state of the art turbine blades, and has decided to double its Arcam EBM machine capacity.”
I don’t think this means FastEBM merely they had 10 machines and now have 20 or something like that.
If you saw something else referring to FastEBM please do share.
Ant
i saw it on an investorshub post, so no other link. So you may be right about it being a confusion.
OTOH we know the FASTEBM and other followup research has been done, that the CEO said it would be “easy” to incorporate these changes to increase speed up to 5 times, and we can estimate the usual time from lab to production. Using these , I have long made an estimate (also known as a WAG) that 2016 will probably see introduction of a new much faster EBM machine. Probably also one able to produce larger parts. 20
i saw it on an investorshub post, so no other link. So you may be right about it being a confusion.
OTOH we know the FASTEBM and other followup research has been done, that the CEO said it would be “easy” to incorporate these changes to increase speed up to 5 times, and we can estimate the usual time from lab to production. Using these , I have long made an estimate (also known as a WAG) that 2016 will probably see introduction of a new much faster EBM machine. Probably also one able to produce larger parts. 2017 at the latest.
One of the things that got me into Arcam was the likelihood that they will not be stuck with present rather nascent technology. That at least some of that big investment (mostly done by others free for Arcam) would pay off. The EU wouldn’t have sunk millions into it if their scientists didn’t see a good potential real world payoff.
Actually Mauser I disagree. I think they almost certainly would announce the results.
They need to show what European sponsors are getting for their money.
They need to block the competing announcements coming out of other research camps especially HP otherwise they will be missing orders or orders will be on hold.
They are championing the cause of EBM - they need to make sure EBM is seen as unique and competitive or best in class vs other 3D approaches
Ant, they have specifically said they were stopping announcing every sale … based on the reasonable notion that sales had progressed beyond the point where every sale was significant. To be sure, short of a really dramatic J curve of sales, this means a bit of in between time where we would actually like to still be tracking every sale before it gets to the point where individual sales are really beside the point.
I don’t often think you are wrong, but I do think you are wrong about the need for maximum press around EBM in order to counter HP and others. To be sure, there is a lot of competing for attention. But HP is so far competing for attention based on something they might do. Arcam is talking about design wins, superior results, transition to production, volume. Whole different category and, moreover, it is patent protected technology with lots of improvements in the pipeline. Whatever dubious threat HP might pose is years down the line. The people who matter, i.e., actual prospective customers in medical or aerospace know that Arcam has technology which delivers today and HP has stories.
The issue of EBM vs other technologies is really too technical for marketing. Relevant industries are going to study the question and for some of them other technologies will be a better fit, but when EBM is the right fit, that is going to be clear. Improved EBM will only move more problems into that camp.
http://fortune.com/2015/12/08/hp-3d-printing/
HP is aiming at plastics. Note even the samples aren’t metal.
Due to the high melting point of Titanium alloys lasers of any kind are just not going to work.
a semi description of Xjets process which probably resembles HP
metal 3DP in titanium is a niche inside a niche. A small market compared to plastic and nickel - steel metal alloys.
I suspect HP is going after the bigger markets.
In any case I am unimpressed with today’s HP tech ability - their PC are a blah commodity and their ink jet printers clog frequently.
Arcam’s big problem is not direct 3DP competition but improving their EBM machines to the point that they are more cost effective compared to traditional SM methods. And that seems to boil down to material cost and speed.