Additive Manufacturing Growth Shifts From Selling Machines to Using Them

The 31st annual Wohlers Report, published by Wohlers Associates and distributed through ASTM International, values 2025 global additive manufacturing revenues at $24.2 billion, up 10.9% year on year.

The segment split explains where that money sits: printing services 48%, system sales and servicing 26%, materials 20%, software 6%. Services being nearly half the market is the headline, and the growth rates sharpen it. Services revenue grew 15.5% in 2025 while system sales rebounded only 3.6% — growth is coming from higher utilisation of machines already installed rather than from new machine purchases.

Regional average growth diverged sharply: Asia-Pacific 19.8%, the Americas 12.6%, Europe, Middle East and Africa 9.0%. The report characterises the industry as maturing, driven by utilisation of installed capacity, regional divergence and policy-driven dynamics rather than rapid expansion.

That shift changes who buys what. A service bureau under pressure to run existing printers harder does not need another printer; it needs to know which machines are idle and why, how long jobs actually take against quote, what a failed build cost, and where the queue is stalling. That is overall equipment effectiveness, utilisation tracking and throughput analytics — an industrial IoT layer, applied to a machine population that has historically been connected only for job submission.

It is also a considerably better-defined integration proposition than selling into a greenfield printer purchase. The machines exist, the data exists in their logs, and the customer already knows which number they are trying to move. The obstacle is usually that a bureau runs printers from four vendors with four different interfaces, and normalising build records across them is the actual project.