So what its stocks have been slipping lately: Stratasys, the World’s second largest 3D printer manufacturer for yearly revenues, knows the sky is the limit and is shooting for first place. In fact, the new acquisitions, announced today, may well hand it to Mr. David Reis, Stratasys CEO, as both Solid Concepts, the US’s largest 3D printing service, and Harvest Technologies, a specialty additive manufacturing service bureau, have healthy financial records and “are expected to be accretive to Stratasys’ Non-GAAP earning per share within the first 12 months after closing.”
That is one of the reasons why the Israeli-American giant committed a total of $295 million (still quite a bit less than it paid for MakerBot) for Solid Concepts (which has yearly revenues of about $65 million) and an undisclosed amount for Harvest Technologies. At least that is the purely financial reason, the strategic reasoning behind the acquisition goes well beyond emulating its biggest competitor 3D Systems, which has been acquiring companies for most of the past decade with a steep escalation in the past couple of years. And more news from them today incidentally.
By unifying its own RedEye additive manufacturing service with Solid Concepts’ and Harvest Technology’s infrastructure, machines, process knowhow and end-use parts production capabilities, Stratasys intends to establish one additive manufacturing service business unit, which will in fact be, by far, the largest 3D printing hub in North America (and possibly globally), offering services to all industry production sectors from medical to aeronautics.
This also means Stratasys will now be offering direct metal laser sintering services directly. Based in California, Solid Concepts is an industry pioneer founded in 1991. It has 450 employees and, along with advanced DMLS capabilities (most may remember a certain gun), it has polyjet, SLA, SLS, FDM machines as well as a more traditional and subtractive means of production. Harvest Technologies is based in Texas and has approximately 80 employees. It also has DMLS machines as well LS/SLS, SL/SLA and FDM industrial 3D printers.
Needless to say all parties involved spoke enthusiastically about the acquisition.
Stratasys CEO David Reis said the company is extremely pleased to announce a strategic partnership aimed at providing its customers with a comprehensive offering. “With Solid Concepts and Harvest Technologies, together with RedEye, we expect to create a strategic platform to meet our customers’ additive manufacturing requirements by significantly expanding our offering, targeting new applications, and strengthening our customer relationships. As our customers’ requirements continue to expand, we must evolve to create full service offerings that provide a variety of technologies and custom manufacturing solutions and focus on high-end production applications,” said Reis.
Both Joe Allison, President of Solid Concepts, and David K. Leigh, President of Harvest Technologies, spoke about the new possibilities this deal offers to reach a broader and ever growing customer base, as well as enhancing their own production capabilities by working together with other industry pioneers and leaders.
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