Feb 10 2014
Research and Markets has announced the addition of the "3D Printing Materials Market by Plastics, Metals, Ceramics, Others, Forms & End-User Industries - Global Trends & Forecasts to 2018" report to their offering.
3DP materials are primarily used as raw materials to manufacture any object with the use of a 3D printer. The choice of a 3DP material is quite technical and depends on the 3D printer being used to print objects. 3DP materials exhibit high sensitivity, stability, flexibility, durability, and high strength properties. These properties can be enhanced with an addition of different technologies within the same product to enlarge the characteristics from material to material, or among materials within the same group. These 3DP materials make manufacturing highly familiar and economical. The ability to manufacture a complex design in a short span with low setup costs makes 3D printing efficient in several applications. There are three types of 3DP materials on a major scale, namely, plastics, metals, and ceramics.
The 3DP materials market is driven by the consumer, aerospace, defense, medical and automotive industries and a range of applications, which increases the R&D efforts to make 3DP materials highly resourceful, along with the huge demand from the electronics and bio-medical industry that finds 3DP materials useful in a myriad of applications. Other applications such as food education also help increase the growth of the 3DP materials market. Growing advancements and technological inventions in 3DP materials would be quite effective in future. 3DP materials have been well perceived in various dominant end-user markets in the last few decades and are expected to be used for to print electronics in the near future.
Globally, the North American region dominated the 3DP materials market revenue in 2012. U.S., Japan, China, U.K., and Germany are the major countries with a huge demand for 3DP materials. Asia-Pacific's 3DP materials market for end-use applications is expected to grow at a CAGR of 27.6% from 2013 to 2018, which is far higher than that of North America. Market players concentrate on expanding their geographical reach. Other development strategies adopted by market players are new products launch, agreements & collaborations, and mergers & acquisitions.
The 3DP materials market is contemplating on executing high research activities to create new materials to minimize costs and environmental hazards. One of the major problems is the price range that makes choosing the material very difficult and hard, so as to derive optimal cost effectiveness.