Stratasys CEO Yoav Zeif talks about additive manufacturing with a pitch of enthusiasm typically heard only from those with decades in the industry. Although he’s been at the helm of this 30-year-old company for less than five years, the plans he established from the start to reshape Stratasys — and some would argue, reinvigorate it — are bearing fruit. There’s been a consistent stream of new machines, new hardware and material innovations, new strategic alliances, and — despite a stock price plunge of 55% in the last 52 weeks — relatively consistent revenues topping $627M in 2023. Plus, orders for the new F3300 production FDM printer launched in November are exceeding expectations.
Zeif navigated Stratasys through a very contentious hostile takeover attempt by 3D printer maker Nano Dimension in 2023 while negotiating a possible merger with Desktop Metal and later 3D Systems, both of which did not happen for various reasons. Yet, in the midst of the turmoil, Stratasys persisted in establishing a firmer long-term footprint in the aviation parts and medical models markets.
Just recently, Stratasys partnered with AM Craft, a 3D printing service company that makes aviation products and parts certified for airworthiness by the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA). It also launched an in-depth clinical study with Ricoh USA to prove-out the idea that 3D printed anatomical models used in preoperative planning and tumor excision will lead to better patient outcomes and lower provider costs.
Speaking to All3DP recently, Zeif clearly has his sights set on strengthening Stratasys’ dominance of additive manufacturing spanning five technologies, and leading the rest of the industry in the transition of 3D printing from prototype to manufacturing technology.
There isn’t a day that goes by at All3DP where we don’t get a press release announcing something new from Stratasys — a new machine, a new partnership, a new study, spanning nearly every industry, from fashion to automotive to consumer products. Is the Stratasys strategy right now is to be very broad, because a lot of other am companies that are beginning to narrow their focus?
“At the very high level, we have a laser-sharp strategy to lead this industry from prototyping to manufacturing. It’s a very simple strategy. We believe that we need to deliver on the promise of additive manufacturing where the real opportunities have promise, which is in manufacturing. It doesn’t mean that we don’t do prototyping, or tooling, or jigs and fixtures, but we truly believe that we need to be the one leading the sector into manufacturing. We’ve been very coherent and consistent on it for the last four years.”
If manufacturing is the goal, what’s the roadmap to get there?
“We call it our North Star, which is this: in order to be the [brand] being selected, preferred by customers, you need to deliver what we call superior application fit. What’s important today in additive manufacturing is not to give someone a machine and say ‘good luck,’ which is what’s been happening for the past 35 years. We told people, ‘it’s fantastic, it’s versatile, it’s amazing,’ which it is, but we didn’t guide people on how to use it as a solution for manufacturing.
What do 3D printers need to deliver that manufacturers require?
“I come from a factory background. I used to run plants. I can tell you, from a manufacturer’s perspective, it’s about CAPEX and a clean payback period because I need to show a return on investment. I need to make sure I have the right OEE [overall equipment effectiveness ] because I need the efficiency. I need lower scrap, boost reliability, and achieve very clear measurables. The additive manufacturing industry was not there at all.
“If you want to be in additive manufacturing, you need to adopt the vocabulary and measures based on real manufacturing requirements, which is what we’re doing with our ‘superior manufacturing fit.’ This is a tailored solution covering hardware, materials, software, service, and automation with a workflow that connects all the digital threads of our customers’ specific applications. The service, for example, that we give to dental is not the same service we give prototyping or to aerospace, it’s customized.”
What does this application-focused, customized additive manufacturing look like in practice?
“We are the leaders in tooling, jigs, and fixtures with our FDM solutions, but having our hardware and also the nylon carbon fiber, which is the best for tooling, is not enough. You also need the software that enables a new engineer in the plant to design for tooling. It’s not complex, it’s just required.
“Another good example is what we are doing with dentures. We focus on industrial, medical, and dental, and consumer goods. And we’ve selected four or five applications where we really developed them all the way. Others, around five or 10 [applications], we are just supporting the customers and work with them to be successful, and the rest, we are offering building blocks so they can develop their own applications.
“This is why we have five technology solutions. When I’m standing in front of a customer that wants to distribute tools, there’s our FDM solution; when I’m standing in front of a customer whose problem is designing and producing parts for a car interior, that’s PolyJet or SAF. You can’t sell them what you have, you give them what they need, because no one technology can do everything.”
Do you think the AM industry oversold the applications or possibilities of the technology?
“Over the years, we, as an industry, sold many promises that we could not deliver, because we sold the wrong technology to the application.
“Our focus is to start and end with a strategy. And every strategy starts with the customer. We want to deliver better value than any other company to our customers and to build a new market together with them, because – let’s be honest – additive is a new market. It’s not an existing market where we are competing, we are opening up new markets and we want to deliver the best value to meet the customer expectations.
“Customers will not buy hype, they will buy because we deliver more value than the current solution and we solve their problems better than the current status quo or the current methodologies.”
Stratasys Direct [the company’s 3D printing-as-a-service wing] sold off its metal 3D printing to focus on offering print services using only using Stratasys machines and materials. Is this a downsizing of Stratasys Direct’s role in the larger company?
“When I came to Stratasys four and a half years ago, my goal was to focus, focus, focus, and I asked myself if Stratasys being a service provider of parts was a part of that focus or not. I went back to the strategy mission [[to lead the industry from prototyping to manufacturing]], and I found that the best [additive] manufacturing example we have in the world for high-end end-use parts is Stratasys Direct.
“We had to readjust and change the purpose of Stratasys Direct. At the beginning, the concept was that the market would grow through providing parts, and let’s spend hundreds of millions of dollars on capturing and consolidating part players. Stratasys Direct had eight sites, CNC machining, and urethane injection molding. Was this consistent with our strategy? Not at all, so we divested. Now we focus only on our technologies and we use Stratasys Direct for two things: one is to be the blueprint for manufacturing. If a customer has an automotive application or an aerospace application, we will show them how it works in real time [[at Stratasys Direct]]. It’s practically a pilot for them and a pilot for us.
“The second thing is delivering an extended manufacturing network to our customers for high-end parts. We do not compete with [service providers] that deliver prototypes on consumer machines, we focus on where we are better and where we have unique capabilities. We focus where we have high value parts, we don’t want to compete with simple part players on the weak parts.
“One facility focuses on resin, one on FDM, and one on powder technologies. Say you’re an OEM and you need thousands of parts but you have 40 machines and need 10 more to be on time. You now have those 10 more machines, but they are at Stratasys Direct. We are really bringing to life this ability to have distributed manufacturing. It’s the same machine, it just sits at a Stratasys Direct facility in Minnesota.
Both the new FDM, the F3300 and the new J5 Digital Anatomy, have innovations and changes that appear to be customer driven. How much of these new features are a reflection of real world application needs from customers?
“We develop with customers. We have a few leading FDM customers that we reach out to consistently to collect all of their views about what they need in FDM. It was many small things that added up to three things: bigger parts, better throughput, and consistency. So when we had the first new iterations of our FDM machine, we invited in users to give us their feedback and we adjusted based on their feedback.
“The J5 was a similar story, but from market demand not from existing customers. We have the J850 Digital Anatomy that is more expensive than the J5 and it works really well for the Mayo Clinics and the Cleveland Clinics of the world because they have the budget. These customers train thousands of doctors a year on these machines and they provide a lot of feedback.
“But we heard from many other hospitals and networks of hospitals, that it is not accessible enough. You can’t have thousands of machines at this complexity level at this price. So we had to develop a new tool for anatomical modeling.”
When you joined Stratasys, you kickstarted a focus on sustainability and recently won awards from the Additive Manufacturer Green Trade Association for that initiative. How does sustainability fit into Stratasys’ identity and strategy?
“For us sustainability is part of life. We established a sustainability unit because if there isn’t someone dedicated to it and to evangelize it within the organization, it will never work.
“We developed the concept of ‘mindful manufacturing’. How do you make manufacturing more mindful? Use more additive. But first we looked in the mirror. We are one of the first companies [[in additive]] using GRI* reporting and it’s a huge effort with many people working on it because you have to expose yourself completely. What is your environmental footprint? What is your CO2 emission levels?
“It’s important because you can’t be a sustainable solution for manufacturers if you’re not sustainable yourself. You can’t tell someone to stop eating sweets if you’re still eating sweets, so we stopped eating sweets.
“In our machine and material development process, we’re investing in giving the engineers the options to design in ways that reduce the emissions across our products and solutions. We’re also focusing on the lifecycle analysis of additive manufacturing a product versus traditionally manufacturing it.
“Customers want to do business with companies that value the environment. It’s part of our purpose. We say we empower people to create without limits, to be more economical, more personalized, and more sustainable. This is part of who we are.”
* Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) is an international standard that helps organization understand and communicate their impacts on issues, such as climate change, human rights, and corruption.
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