How is Formlabs strengthening its presence in Europe?

The American manufacturer Formlabs is one of the historical players in the 3D printing market, particularly in the stereolithography segment. Today, the company employs more than 500 people in 7 offices worldwide and has already produced more than 40 million parts. Last week, it held its User Summit for the first time in Europe, in Berlin to be precise. Formlabs announced ambitious projects, the company hopes that within the next 5 years, 1 billion users will use its 3D printing technology for the creation of parts. For this occasion, we were able to meet Stefan Hollaender, EMEA Managing Director, and Dávid Lakatos, Chief Product Officer to learn more about Formlabs’ projects, particularly in Europe.

3DN: First of all, can you tell us some more about the User Summit ?

Stephan: The whole idea of such a users summit is a couple of years old, it is something we have done in the US a couple of times already. There we saw how positive and insightful the discussion is with the people who are really using our products in their daily life for either production, design or even creating new stuff they have in mind. The exchange with us as a company helps the users get real insights on how things turn out, so the positives and maybe also the things we need to work on and improve. Our customers come up with plenty of interesting new ideas that we want to work on and collaborate to bring even more materials/products to the market. This summit is a great platform for users to have that exchange with us and learn what others do, but also give us their feedback.

Stefan Hollaender (left) and Dávid Lakatos (right)

3DN: Why did you bring the summit to Europe as well?

David: Europe is about 40% of our market, it’s the largest market after North America for Formlabs. A lot of our customers have been here, that’s why we opened our Berlin office back in 2014 already. Very early in the life of the company we knew it was going to be global. And if you look to other 3D printing companies, especially Europeans ones, they end up being regional and a lot of them are not heard of in the US. We, from the very beginning, have been looking into industrial reports, making sure we distributed enough. In Asia for example, we are still behind, it’s a very different market, but we are growing very quickly. Hopefully we can bring our user summit to Asia too.