HP Announced Multiple Partnerships for Their New Multi Jet Fusion 3D Printers

At the beginning of the week HP has published two new 3D printers. Only a few days after publishing the new 3D printers, HP also announced their strategic partnerships with other big companies.

At the RAPID, the largest conference for additive manufacturing in the U.S., HP has unveiled their new 3D printers. According to HP the new 3D printers are up to 10 times faster as common printing systems but at the same time they cost only the half. We have already published an article about the Multi Jet Fusion 3D Printers which contains more details.

The partners were allowed to bring up their ideas to HP and to support them in the development of the new manufacturing system. They have teamed up with multiple companies – Nike, BMW, Autodesk, Jabil, Johnson & Johnson, Materialise, Proto Labs, Shapeways and Siemens among others. All of the partners are convinced by the technique that the Multi Jet Fusion 3D printer uses, and some of the partners will start to use the 3D printer in their companies soon.

Siemens has announced that they have started with the development of software that’s specially tailored for the HP 3D printer. Siemens is already an expert for 3D modelling software and production environment and therefore they are perfectly prepared for the creation of such a software project. The global electronics and industrial conglomerate, is also investing in additive manufacturing, only weeks ago they opened a new facility for 3D printing in Sweden.

Like most of the other partners Nike wants to profit from the technique. The company uses 3D printing since 2014 and has already used the technology for production. The president of Nike Innovation, Tom Clarke, at least hinted that more of those kinds of new prototypes and explorative projects can be expected.

At Nike we innovate for the world’s best athletes. We’ve been using 3D printing to create new performance innovations for footwear for the past several years. Now we are excited to partner with HP to accelerate and scale our existing capabilities as we continue to explore new ways to manufacture performance products to help athletes reach their full potential

BMW has been using additive manufacturing since 25 years as a manufacturing technology. With the new Multi Jet Fusion 3D Printer they want to start serial part production and more personal customisation.

BMW is a pioneer and early adopter of innovative technologies in the field of additive manufacturing, especially for prototyping in concept cars and series-like approval builds. For our future roadmap toward serial part production and personal customization, we see major potential in our partnership with HP to investigate this new kind of 3D printing technology at an early stage. As one of the first partners, we had the chance to see the constant evolution of the machines over time from the first prototype approximately five years ago to the market ready product that is available now

The publishing of the Multi Jet Fusion 3D printer was a big milestone for HP. According to HP it was as important as the first ink printer and the first laser printer. It’s not predictable how much 3D printers will be sold by HP in the near future, but one thing is clear: The HP Jet Fusion 3D 3200 Printer and HP Jet Fusion 3D 4200 Printer are cheaper than models of the competitors. The pricing for the HP Jet Fusion 3D 3200 starts at 120.000 Euros and the end-to-end solution costs around 145.000 Euros. You can compare that to the price of the 3D printer that RICOH starts selling this week. The RICOH AM S5500P 3D printer costs around 600.000€ and has approximately the same build area.