Good afternoon. Welcome to 3D Systems Investor Day. We're very excited To have you all here with us in Detroit. The slides we present today are available on our investor relations website. For those on the webcast, you will be able to submit a question through the webcast portal. We will have a Q&A session at the end of the main presentations. Refreshments will be available in the Ballroom C throughout the session, and we will have a short break around 2:30 P.M. Before we begin, I want to remind you that today's discussion and responses to your questions reflect management's views as of today only and will include forward-looking statements as described on this slide. Actual results may differ materially.
Additional information about factors that could potentially impact our financial results is included in our filings with the SEC, including our most recent annual report on Form 10-K and quarterly reports on Form 10-Q. During this event, we will discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. In our slides accompanying this webcast, you will find additional disclosures regarding these non-GAAP measures, including reconciliations of these measures with comparable GAAP measures. Now, we'll start with a brief video before we kick off the presentations. Thank you.
3D Systems brought 3D printing to the manufacturing industry. Today, as the leading additive manufacturing solutions partner, we bring performance-driven innovation to every interaction, empowering our customers to create products and business models never before possible. Through the expertise of our application engineers, we help our customers find application-specific solutions to transform their businesses with our unique offering of hardware, software, materials, and services.
Our solutions address a variety of advanced applications in healthcare and industrial markets such as medical and dental, aerospace and defense, automotive and durable goods. Each customer specific solution begins with our Application Innovation Group. We are engineers, designers, and technicians who live and breathe additive manufacturing.
Our mission is to enable customer adoption of our technology via application development. We help customers take an idea and move it through to market. We're really redefining the way manufacturing can happen.
We solve the most difficult design and production challenges from the very first step of identifying our customer's needs, through to validating and scaling their manufacturing flow.
After having developed AM application for semicon and aerospace by working together very closely with 3D Systems, Wilting was able to invest in its own 3D printing capacity. Thanks to a thorough technology transfer and on-site training, we could invest in the second printer in less than six months after installing the first one.
The benefit is really just-in-time inventory control. Having your parts when you need them is perfect for aerospace sustainment. The Figure 4 enables us to print parts at a speed that we have not seen before. We now have the ability to create high tolerance parts that are repeatable and scalable.
We've got exactly what we want in a product that we know is going to perform. No compromises in any part of the transmission, and the entire thing's completely custom for our application.
Leading a team of scientists and people who really are deeply versed and educated in material science and chemistry and metallurgy, we've got great tools and resources to be able to solve problems for our customers.
We use the power of additive manufacturing through prototyping, tooling, and event production. We take advantages of Figure 4 print speed and its material versatility to match the diverse range of applications with the best fit of material properties.
3D Systems has been a great partner for NuVasive to work with. They also have a team of dedicated experts that can help with any issues that arise during the design or 3D printing process.
Out in their Littleton facility, they have countless people that are providing medical support in patient-specific devices.
Now with 3D Systems, we really see the potential to drive this forward and to make products that will enable the translation of these technologies for us to get this out of scientific publications and really have a path forward to bring this to patients.
The opportunity is that there's millions of people around the world that need replacement organs or could medically benefit. The challenge is the most complicated structures in the known universe are found inside of your body. How do we manufacture something that complicated that could be seamless with your body? For the incredible mission of building an unlimited supply of replacement organs for human patients, we're really privileged to work with United Therapeutics and their mission to provide this to humanity. We're working for a world where people don't have to die so that other people can live.
We've moved to emphasize bioprinting and regenerative medicine. At this point in time, we're taking this step to help influence the future of mankind. Because of the tremendous progress we're seeing with United Therapeutics' lung project and more projects for ourselves and others, even though routine medical procedures are sometime in the future, now is the time to start building for this future.
Pushing the boundaries with expert additive manufacturing solutions and consultation, helping our customers make the existing better and the new possible.
Good afternoon. I'm Jeff Graves, the President and CEO of 3D Systems. Let me add my thanks to Melody for those who made the trip here to Detroit to be with us live and for all of those that are joining us on the web today as well. It's a pleasure to have you all. I tell you, it's a tremendously exciting business. It's a tremendously exciting industry, and the pace of change has never been higher. This month, May, marks my two-year anniversary here at 3D Systems, and I've never been more excited about the future for our whole industry and certainly for our company.
Before I start with my prepared remarks, I just wanna acknowledge two people that are here, a bit on the fly, but here to attend are the Chairman of our board, Chip McClure, is sitting in near the back there. Many of you that have followed the company for a long time have said kind things about the progress we made in the last couple of years. I wanna tell you, and particularly as a public company, those kinda changes are never possible without a strong support of the board. Chip was in detail involved in recruiting me to 3D Systems and certainly leads the Board of Directors in support of everything we're doing today and really has been a great team member in driving the change that you've seen in our results. Then Dr. Steve Klasko.
We announced this morning that we're forming our first medical advisory board, and it's really driven by the pace of change in our regenerative medicine business. For those of you who can attend dinner this evening, it is truly remarkable technology. The markets are evolving. It's difficult to predict some details on timing, but the pace of progress is exceptional. We're to a point now of maturity where we could benefit from a medical advisory board to advise us on full spectrum of issues from some scientific issues to regulatory approvals, to partnerships around the world. Dr. Klasko, I would encourage you, please read the press release. I would take my entire time to read Dr. Klasko's credentials in joining us as the chair of the advisory group, but tremendous background.
Suffice it to say, in 2020, Steve was named a distinguished fellow of the World Economic Forum, who meets in Davos every year. Many, I'm sure most of you know that forum. It's business and government leaders from around the world who get together to talk about the future. Steve was named the first distinguished fellow that comes and talks about the future of healthcare and particularly how technology can and should impact that to deliver better quality healthcare to people around the world. Steve, thank you for joining the cause here. We really appreciate it. Thanks for being here today. With that, most of you in the room follow the company in some detail, and you hear from me all the time.
I'm gonna kick this off, and then I'm gonna hand off to the management team who you don't hear from very often, but who really make these changes happen. I'll talk about the team. We designed the agenda to actually go through exactly how we view our company and how we run our company. We're gonna talk about our two business units, industrial and healthcare solutions, starting with healthcare and transitioning to industrial solutions. Menno Ellis and Reji Puthenveetil lead our businesses. They're out in front of the customer and the trends every day and really defining our priorities in the technologies we develop and how we go to market. Then we're gonna move on to the technology section. You're gonna hear from Benjamin Schrauwen and David Leigh.
Ben about software and the remarkable progress that's in store for us in our software, our suite of software options through Oqton, and then David on our hardware and materials technology evolution. Then Wayne Pensky is gonna bring it all together. Our interim CFO is gonna bring it all together into our financial model for the future, and then we'll open it up for Q&A. I know many of you are on a rigid schedule on the back end of this meeting, so we will stick to the timing, try to maybe even beat it a little bit. We'll open it up for Q&A to those in the room and on the web.
Then this evening, for those who are here in person, I would truly love to see you come to dinner with us tonight and learn about our regenerative medicine efforts. They are truly remarkable. We're plowing new ground in science every day. It's moving into a phase where now it's increasingly engineering issues in creating basically human body parts. That's how fast the technology is moving. If you catch the subtlety, it's transitioning from science to engineering, and engineering problems are solvable. Yeah. That's the phase we're moving into, to be followed by traditional studies and clinical trials. You'll hear a lot about regenerative medicine tonight and some remarkable technology. The folks on the top, you're gonna hear from directly today. The folks on the bottom are some with us, some are not.
Chuck Hull, who was on the video, remarkable man. He invented 3D printing back in the late 1980s and continues to be our chief technology officer focused today on regenerative medicine, which has really been his baby for the last four years. He's still the chief architect of that work going on in partnership with United Therapeutics and work on our own as well. Andy Johnson, our Chief Legal Officer, but also a great partner in all the divestitures we've done. Andy's led a lot of those divestitures and made sure they got over the goal line in a remarkably short period of time. Now, as we've moved more into an acquisition phase, Andy has led a lot of that activity as well. Phyllis Nordstrom, the newest member of our team. Companies live and die by their culture.
The culture of our company, we are looking at every day, we're refreshing key elements of it. Phyllis is really the architect of that and the owner, as we increasingly look to attract talent, diversify the employment base, and really drive for a faster and faster pace of creation. As I said, May marks my two-year anniversary. If you look back on our history, the company was founded in the late 1980s. Our company and most companies in this space really look at themselves, in my opinion, as making printers and selling printers or developing materials and software and selling those almost as business units. That's how our company was structured when I arrived. Going forward, with the state of adoption of additive manufacturing now, I think it pays to look at your company much differently.
In the summer of 2020, we turned the company ninety degrees, if you will, and redefined ourselves as having a healthcare business and an industrial solutions business. Okay? Why did we do that? It's so customers in the healthcare industry, customers like Johnson & Johnson or Stryker or others, could come to our healthcare business, and we would understand what they meant about quality, delivery, FDA-approved processes. We would know how to implement solutions for them that were appropriate for healthcare businesses. You don't get that by simply selling printers or selling software to those guys. You have to become a healthcare company yourself. Similarly, on the industrial solutions business, very much the same in aerospace and others. When your customer comes to you, they want you to understand their business very deeply, so you can provide a comprehensive solution.
That also ends up being a very good business model for the company providing it. We reorganized the company in mid 2020. This is how we go forward. You'll note the dots down there, bioprinting and regenerative medicine. Those are emerging businesses, if you will. Some of that may find its way into our current healthcare business and just expanding the scope of our current healthcare business. It's also equally possible that regenerative medicine will be a business in its own right with its own customer base and such, and infrastructure in the years to come. Those are emerging businesses. If you look today, we're reorganized, we are restructured, we are lean, we are faster than we've ever been before, and we've got an excellent balance sheet to support future growth. Importantly, we're delivering that growth today.
If you look at our quarter-over-quarter results, we're growing at double-digit rates organically. We're generating, I'd call them respectable margins and margins that we expect to improve. You're gonna hear from Wayne about that later on. I'm pleased with our position. We've got a long way to go, and we've got a very exciting future ahead, both on the top and bottom line performance. All companies generally start with the key numbers, just facts. I'll do the same thing. Today we are structured as we wanna be, we're the size we wanna be, and we're growing from here. We're just under 2,000 employees. We're very proud of our patent portfolio. We've got over 1,000 patents issued to the company. We've got 80 application engineers. I'm gonna keep coming back to application engineers.
You heard it in the video, if you were listening. I'll keep coming back to the key role they play for us, and I think a real differentiator in our company. We serve today 20 market segments across healthcare and in the industrial space, and we have the largest sales and service team in the entire industry. Why is that important? Customers these days, especially large global OEMs, want you to take care of them from the moment they have an idea until they have an installed fleet of printers that are running for the next 20 years. We have the infrastructure to serve that. To provide the solutions we provide, we must have the broadest set of technologies in the industry. That means metal to polymer, which we're committed to. We have seven basically platform families.
You're gonna hear more about that from David Leigh. We developed two major bioprinting platforms to grow from. One designed for the laboratory for basic research and pharmaceutical use, and the other for printing human organs and soft tissue for the human body. We have over 130 proprietary materials we've developed over time, and we continue to accelerate our pace of development. Those are materials that create exceptional value for our customers and obviously bring benefits to our company as well, and we have the most extensive software platform in the industry, bar none. We've opened up those software platforms to our competitors and to all of our customers to use as well because we think it's for the good of the industry, and it obviously is good for our company as well, and same with materials, the direction it's headed.
Those kind of things that accelerate additive in general, we're trying to provide to the industry as a whole. What does all this mean? If you look at the results of those facts, today we serve 30,000 customers a year, more customers than anyone in the industry for production applications, over 30,000. We've sold in our history over 35,000 printers, but note, over 20,000 of them are running today in production. In production. Those 20,000 plus printers consume 4,800 tons of proprietary materials a year. 4,800 tons. That's 42 train car loads of materials a year. As of last month, those printers are churning out 1 million parts per day, over 1 million parts per day. The last time I quoted that number a few months back, it was 700,000.
Today it's over 1 million parts per day in production around the world. You're going to hear more about the fleet of printers we have running and the distribution of customers who are running multiple printers. What does all that mean? As additive manufacturing moves into true large-scale production environments, we've become the most knowledgeable and experienced company in the world with making that transition happen, understanding the issues around it, and supporting customers as they implement fleets of printers. I think we're very well positioned for the future. I think everybody knows what an exciting growth market that additive lives in today. You can look at a range of studies with somewhere around $15 billion today in size, the additive industry in total, growing to something like $50 billion in size by 2026.
A very fast-growing market, very large market. What's driving it? You're all aware, design flexibility for designers in your customer base. Mass customization is something that's increasingly being referred to. Making large quantities of parts, but with every part or collection of parts being customized for the application, whether it's an engine or an orthopedic implant or even a human body part. Supply chain flexibility, never more important than today, as we've seen the last two years, and low volume parts faster and with faster product cycles as well. When I arrived, I viewed this industry in production primarily as one that lent itself to low volume, complex parts. Completely different viewpoint today. I think that's a great application for additive.
Increasingly what we're seeing is our customers coming to us that produce high volumes of parts, but those parts change in design frequently, or there may be a variety of SKUs, a large number of SKUs they have to produce. For them to do it with traditional manufacturing techniques, certainly it's possible in many cases, but the cost in tooling and inventory is exceptionally high. The flexibility they get with additive and the economic benefits are substantial. Markets we serve, you're going to hear a lot more about this from Reji and Menno in a few moments. Aerospace and defense, automotive, two of the big ones, obviously, for industrial.
Healthcare between dentistry and other medical devices, as we refer to it, that encompasses both personalized healthcare, where we're designing custom parts with a surgeon to repair skeletal systems, as well as medical device implants like spinal implants. Things of that nature all fall in our healthcare business or med device segment. Very exciting to me are these emerging markets in regenerative medicine. They, by definition, lend themselves to additive manufacturing. It's just the precision, the intricacy, the materials are all different in detail. The basics are the same, though. You're just designing something for the human body. How are we differentiated from competitors? We broke it simply into large competitors and small competitors in this comparison. One theme, if you don't walk away with anything else from my introduction, I want you to understand how our business works.
We wake up every day focused on applications. What applications benefit our customers the most, and which markets derive the most value from those applications? We're application-focused. We can be application-focused because underneath that, we have the broadest range of technology to support it, from printers to materials to software. We bring those applications to life with customers every day, and when they like what they get, we can scale it, demonstrate the validity of manufacturing, the economics of the manufacturing, define the workflow. We could even move it into limited production. Once it exceeds the volumes that we produce, we enable them to scale it up. We enable either the OEM themselves or third parties to scale the manufacturing process. Through that life cycle, we support the customer.
Starts with applications and moves into the basic technologies that go into those applications. Earlier this year, we met to kind of crisp up our strategic focus. Everything you're going to hear today is organic. Everything that we're talking about today is organic. We're not talking about acquisitions. Frankly speaking, acquisitions for us are purely opportunistic at this point. Everything in our future basically is under our own control, and we have the balance sheet to invest in it. What does that really mean our focus is? First of all, that blue box in the middle is critical, day-to-day execution, managing supply chains, managing the pace of change with your customers. It requires you to keep the eye on the ball every day.
From a strategic focus standpoint, on the middle of the page on the right, we basically say there are three strategic initiatives for our company that'll make us successful. One, on the far left, you see new solution revenue, and that's that application focus and bringing our technologies to bear to deliver the applications. What it drives is the development of new printers, new materials, new software, guided by the application that's trying to be solved for. Okay? The application defines what we do, and then we adapt our technologies to support that. Recurring revenue is an enormous lever in this business for driving both top line and particularly bottom line performance. We focus on driving new solution revenue for the top line. We then also focus in parallel on recurring revenue.
That's developing materials and software to support the customer on a recurring basis after you sell printers and then providing services. Increasingly important when customers get large, complex fleets and run them for 20 years, in some cases 24/7. Finally, for our company specifically, manufacturing excellence. We've had a fairly fragmented approach to manufacturing. Frankly speaking, we've got a lot of upside for ourselves in really crisping that up, make sure we have a really tight manufacturing strategy. Customers today need printers on time. They need us to deliver materials and software on time. It all gets back to supply chain and manufacturing. You'll see us work a lot. It sounds a little mundane, but there's a lot of gold in doing that, both on top line growth and on bottom line margin improvement.
Strategically, new solution revenue, recurring revenue, manufacturing excellence, all driving gross margin expansion. You'll hear about our goals from Wayne at the end. I'm gonna repeat it one more time with this graphic, because I don't want you to forget. We are an application-focused company. If you look at our website, you'll see some really pretty views of an enormous number of applications that we're delivering every day. You're gonna hear about it from the two business leaders that follow me. With that application focus, we bring the technologies to bear to solve them. The hardware, software and materials brought together to solve applications for key customers and key market verticals. We have confirmed we solve those applications, customers expand their application envelope, we sell more product, we sell more recurring revenue.
It works each time we go about it, and it's why our organic growth rates today are double digits. Again, you're gonna hear about various printer models, the range of software we have. The process we follow to drive growth is basically laid out on this page. You go through an exploratory phase with a customer. Often, the customer's coming to us to say, "We have an application we think will work wonders with additive manufacturing. Is it viable? And if so, what are the economics around it?" We have 80-plus application engineers involved in that exploration, and innovation, and development process up front. Over 80 application engineers. Largest number and best in the industry. They work with customers in detail to explore and bring to life those applications. We model the economics.
We print it on a reproducible basis and say yes or no, and we show them the economic model. If they like it, most often they say, "Could you print more of those? Tens or hundreds. Could you print more of those?" We print them, and we sell them to them, and we demonstrate over and over the workflow works, the economics are validated. At some point, volumes continue to rise and we say, "Now, you guys need to scale." We transition the technology to them, the process workflow. They buy printers, they buy consumables, and they scale it, or a third party scales it for them. That's this process. Exploration, innovation, development, validation, critical thing within our own four walls for the customer, and then produce the product and scale with the customer.
That's the process we follow. A laundry list of logos, most of which we can't show. This chart gives you a flavor by market of the types of people we serve. Many, many more who are a bit shy and don't want their logo shown. Culture is a huge deal to our company. You wanna know a key piece of why we've accelerated in terms of our top-line growth and our financial performance, it's we're driving cultural updates, if you will. We have a huge push on attracting experts. We're blessed in this industry with a number of people that have been at it for some time. Largely, some cases since SLA at the beginning, who have served a variety of roles, maybe a variety of companies.
We're trying to attract many of those experts to our company. They bring with them seasoned talent. In parallel, we're hiring folks out of school. We're grossly expanding our internship programs to bring young talent into the business. That's a pipeline of talent coming in. In order to keep them and keep them excited, the work is exciting in and of itself. These days, you must create an environment where people enjoy coming to work. A culture of inclusiveness, a culture of diversity, acceptance of different ideas, it's great business because these folks have extremely creative ideas. Many of the young people we hire today grew up with 3D printing in their high school or middle school laboratories. They've been exposed to it for a long time. They've imagined for a long time what it could do.
Engaging them when they graduate from college or even while they're in college and putting them into an environment that they really enjoy, their colleagues and the culture that you're growing means the world to them, probably as much or more than money, quite frankly. Our retention rates are in my opinion very strong right now in this economy where it's hard to keep people, 'cause the work's exciting and the culture we're creating, I think, is very attractive. Finally, we're modernizing our ways of work. Sustainability, huge initiative for all companies, obviously. I just talked about some key elements of people, diversity and engagement of employees at all levels. Climate is a huge deal, as is elimination of waste.
It's a huge deal for the company itself, making sure you don't pollute the environment, so you're environmentally friendly as a company. In reality, we largely assemble products. We don't have a lot of chemical processes or emissions, but we do enable our customers to reduce theirs. A big impact we have on society is helping customers to reduce waste and improve the climate or avoid degrading the climate. Last chart. Investor thesis. Why should folks invest in 3D Systems, along with additive manufacturing in general? 3D Systems. We are a roughly $600 million company today. We have a serviceable market of over $6 billion. Plenty of room for growth. In that market, we're delivering double-digit growth today on the top line. How do we do it?
Those three points right there say it all. We have an extremely strong application focus, if you haven't picked that up already, a strong application focus. We have the broadest range of hardware in the industry. Hardware, software and materials. Broadest range of technology in the industry. It's critical to our success. It's like tools in the toolbox of the master mechanic. The master mechanic is the application engineer. The tools are printers, they're materials, they're software tools that they bring together, oftentimes in a unique way, to solve a customer solution problem. Finally, we have the scale to support customer needs from the, from the first time they have an idea in the sales process until they've got an installed fleet of printers, and we service them for the next 20 years. We've got the scale to support even the largest OEMs right now around the world.
Application focus, broadest range of technology and scale. I think with that, if we invest well and run the company well, we've got a tremendous future ahead, one in which we believe we'll deliver double-digit organic growth and expanding margins for years and years to come. Everything you're gonna see for the rest of the afternoon does not take into account anything you're gonna see this evening with regenerative medicine, okay? It's all organic, and it's all to do with our current business growth. What you'll see tonight is a brand-new field, if you will. Okay? With that, I'm gonna hand off to Menno Ellis, who runs our Healthcare Solutions business. Menno.
All right. Sound active?
Wonderful.
Hello, and thank you everybody for joining online and here in person today. What I'll do is I'll start off with a quick overview about the Healthcare Solutions Group, so you know who we are, and then from there, transition pretty quickly into what we see as kind of the critical challenges in the healthcare space today and how our technology and our solutions can help address those. Really, that narrative is based on kind of four fundamental drivers. First, the fact that you can take medical devices that historically have been cast or machined and make them perform better or more cost-effective by 3D printing.
You can take those benefits and amplify them further by incorporating them into a personalized medical treatment for a patient, working initially with OEMs that makes those devices, and then subsequently bringing those benefits even closer to the patients by engaging directly with the point of care providers who are administering the treatments. Finally, I'll close with a little bit of a glimpse into the future on what we're doing on the bioprinting side, particularly with respect to supporting laboratory research and accelerating drug development timelines. We've been in this business with you know, 30+ years of experience in the healthcare side. We talked about personalization. I mentioned that a minute ago. We have done over 150,000 patient cases, again, matched to the individual patient within our organization.
We've also manufactured over 2 million medical devices, and this is just within our facilities, not counting the millions upon millions of parts that have been manufactured by some of our customers with our printers, software or materials. We've got 4 ISO 13485 certified facilities, two in Europe, two in the US, which basically means that we are certified and cleared to make medical devices in those facilities. We've developed a number of devices and worked with our customers on getting more than 100 devices cleared by the FDA and by the European regulatory bodies. We've got a tremendous amount of regulatory experience within the healthcare space as well that we can bring to bear. We essentially operate in 3 markets today, orthopedics, craniomaxillofacial, and dental.
What that means is that we can treat just about any body part, from shoulders, hips, knees, ankles, spines, cranial restorations, facial restorations, and a number of indications within the dental space. Aligners, dentures, crowns, bridges, and so on. Big markets, exciting markets, growing markets, but we're always looking for those new opportunities. One of the newest ones that we've identified and cleared to begin operating is in radiation oncology, and I'll spend a couple of minutes later telling you more about that. This has been a good business from us from a financial performance standpoint. It's a business that grows about 20% year-over-year for a number of years now and reached $274 million at the end of 2021.
A little more than half of that currently comes from our dental segments and then the remainder from the medical device side. You can see we've got some pretty good addressable markets that we think we can engage with and continue to penetrate. On the emerging side, we've got the bioprinting. You heard Jeff mention it for a little bit, and there's two chapters to the story. The areas that I'll cover is talking about what we can do with the laboratories and specifically engaging with the pharmaceutical companies to help get drugs developed and out to market faster. This evening, you'll hear from my colleagues, Katie and Bhagat, who are gonna be talking about our bioprinting capabilities applied to regenerative medicine and how we have some really exciting applications for in-body placements and applications. Like I said, we've grown.
Last year was a great year for us, growing at 40%. This year, up to $64 million as of the end of the first quarter. If we transition to what's going on in the healthcare space today. Toughest thing that gets a lot of headline is cost, escalating cost. Couple of studies have looked at this, and if you look at data from about a decade, over the past decade, surgical care has almost doubled in cost during that time period. You see inflation within healthcare basically running at twice the pace of the CPI. Very compelling situation there. Now, from a patient outcome standpoint, if you're in the U.S., you're in pretty good shape, right? Our healthcare is generally pretty good, but even here you're talking about a hospital readmission rate of 14% every year.
If we zero in specifically on the orthopedic side of things, we're seeing about 1 million hospital readmissions occurring after an orthopedic surgery of some kind. You've got the usual, demographics that people think about, right? First of all, aging populations everywhere, and then the fact that all of us, as we get older, we have great expectations about maintaining our quality of life, continuing to be active and so on. All these things together really produce quite a bit of pressure and stress on the healthcare system overall. Good news is there's ample research out there that basically corroborates that we can make a significant, positive impact on these challenges with 3D printing. We can improve surgical outcomes for the patients, we can save time, save money in the operating room, and also enable a number of new solutions that can address patient's.
Patient needs that oftentimes go unmet. Where do we start? We start with 3D printing better medical devices. If you think about the way medical devices, particularly implantable ones, have historically been made, it's through milling, machining or casting. By 3D printing either the entire device or key components of it, we've proven that we can lower the cost and design them in a certain way with a level of detail that facilitates bone regrowth once those devices have been implemented into the body. Why is that important? Well, the faster the bone regrows, once that device has been implanted, the faster that implant becomes stable within the body, people feel better, get comfortable, back on their feet, out of the hospital, oftentimes with less discomfort and leaving with joints that perform better than their machined or cast alternatives.
This is purely by applying 3D printing capabilities and print prep technology to the manufacturing of this. We haven't personalized anything yet to the patient. We'll come to that, and that's going to help us further. Just by doing this, we can have a tremendous impact. We as a company have brought thousands of products to the market by doing this. Specifically, how do we do this? This goes back to what Jeff mentioned earlier about our application-driven approach. Right? Plays out extremely well on the medical device side as well. Our application engineers engage early on with our customers to design the devices, validate them, test them, support them through the regulatory process, and then we start producing.
We've got two factories, one in the U.S., one in Europe, where we basically start putting these parts into production within our own house, validate the workflow, making sure that the yields and efficiencies are what we want it to be. At that point, we'll go back to the customer and say, "All right, this is now ready for prime time. We can help you set up with printers, materials, software, so you can take this manufacturing in-house. Or if you would like to leave a portion or frankly all of the production capacity with us to fulfill on an outsourced basis, we can do so as well." Giving lots of flexibility in that regard.
What I want to do next is introduce you to a couple of gentlemen that really give a very good explanation about how this model works and what their experience has been of working with 3D Systems on this kind of flow.
If you think about what's maybe missing in the medical device segment today, is that truly that ability to dream.
It wasn't until more recently that we understood what 3D printing can actually do for orthopedics.
Paragon Medical is a contract manufacturer for the medical device industry. We are in Warsaw, Indiana, which is the orthopedic capital of the world.
We started working with Ignyte in 2018. They actually approached Paragon with an idea for an innovative shoulder system. We built a team. We assembled a surgeon team that's next to none. From that, we came up with some really cool ideas.
We really understand how to bring products to market as it relates to that initial component of actually 3D printing parts. That's why the relationship with 3D Systems makes sense.
All of that expertise is removed from Ignyte and placed on 3D Systems. This sounds like a great partnership.
3D Systems and actually what they have put in place, and the process that they put in place is truly best in class.
The input from the 3D Systems team was critical. They have a software called 3DXpert that they were able to plug in these parameters into and then were able to nail pretty much every variable that we had asked for.
We are using the DMP Flex 350 from 3D Systems, and it has been the choice machine for us to actually develop the Ignyte system.
We've been able to optimize parts for humans and make parts better adapt to humans rather than adapting the human to the part. These truly are high value, high quality parts that we're manufacturing. It does require a lot of complexity that without the right partnership, you cannot be successful. The 3D Systems to Paragon to Ignyte was exactly what we had hoped for. The beauty of the relationship that we have with Ignyte and 3D Systems, and obviously Paragon being a big part of that, is truly everyone involved is extremely passionate about what they're doing. To create that perfect porous structure that's theoretically exactly what the body wants, and then to hold it in your hand a couple weeks later is pretty incredible.
Thanks. It's a great story. Very current working relationship with these guys. It also speaks to a little bit of what differentiates us in terms of being able to work with multiple parties together on complex technology and guide the adoption and guide the development every step of the way. That's on 3D printing overall, kind of the benefits of us utilizing the technology in the production of medical devices. What I wanna go next is if you say, let's take this technology and these benefits and amplify them even further by starting to personalize the treatment to the individual patients. When we're talking about personalizing the treatment, there's a couple of components to it.
First, it's taking data from the patient, the patient's specific anatomy, bringing that into our software, and together with the surgeon that performs the procedure, go through in a virtual environment and basically start planning and rehearsing that surgery that's going to take place. Together with that, we can then produce anatomical models for the surgeon, so he has physical references of the procedure that's about to take place, that not only he can use in his office as he prepares, but can bring him into the operating room as well to have real-time reference pieces on there. The next thing you can do is using that same patient data, we develop specific surgical guides. All right.
Basically different devices that will be applied to the part of the body where the surgery is taking place, allowing the surgeon then to have very clear directions on where to cut, where to drill, et c. Taking a lot of the, let's say, the guesswork almost out of it and having very clear guided procedures to follow with those devices. The final component, in some cases, it actually makes sense to customize and develop a custom implant for the patient based on their particular situation, based on their anatomy. We will apply this methodology across the different market segments where we operate, so cranio-maxillofacial, orthopedic, radiation oncology, and also in dental. We got about two decades worth of doing this level of planning work.
It starts by taking that patient data that we get from the radiologists at the hospitals, loading that into our software, engaging, planning with the surgeon, and then developing the devices that are gonna be used in the procedure, and then bringing them to the hospital where they're gonna get utilized. That skill, that ability to plan is one that we feel we're very proud of. We have a very differentiated place in the industry with that, and so we're constantly looking for new indications and new areas where we can apply that. We've got one here in radiation oncology that we just announced that we're gonna be starting to go to market with. Radiation oncology, this is a story about cancer. Cancer rates are high, unfortunately.
As part of cancer treatments, about half or so of the cases involve some form of radiation. Now, in order for radiation to be applied and administered correctly to the customer or to the patient, you typically would use an accessory of some kind that basically makes sure that it's placed in the right place, area where it needs to be, protecting areas that shouldn't be exposed to radiation, and modulating the right level of intensity. The legacy way of doing this is relatively low tech. It's that picture that you see there with that red circle drawn through it, and it's a rubber and plastic flap that the technicians or operators at radiation clinics will basically cut and tape to part of the patient anatomy and then start the treatment. Well, there's two problems with that.
Number one, it takes time, and time is money when you're in a clinic. The second thing is, from a fit and comfort and effectiveness standpoint, it doesn't always work perfectly when you're using arts and craft. We got a better alternative. We can take this patient data that already exists because it's part of the patient's treatment plans, load that into our software environment, and allow our bioengineers then to basically design an accessory called a bolus, right? That is patient-matched, 3D printing it, and then getting it to the point of delivery. The beauty of this is you now have a device that fits perfectly, can be applied in minutes as opposed to the usual cutting and taping, and it's actually reusable for the next treatment, so you don't have to start all over again every time you do this.
Very excited. This is a new opportunity for us. We just got the 510(k) clearance for this at the end of the first quarter, and we're starting to commercialize this now. Staying with the theme of personalization, dental by very nature is personalized medicine. That's a good thing because otherwise we'd be walking around with stock parts in our mouth, and I don't think any of us would want that. The story for 3D printing in dental is really one where we are looking to advancements in the technology to basically migrate away from legacy milling and casting procedures into 3D printing workflows. As the technology in 3D printing has advanced, both from a hardware side, a software side, and a material standpoint, we're able now to take more and more dental indications and 3D print them more cost-effectively, faster, less messy.
The picture on the left there, that's an actual kind of lab with kind of a historical way of grinding and chipping and casting pieces. Just have a much more elegant and efficient workflow that also allows us, again, similar to other areas, make more complex, more intricate designs to address more patient needs. We've got a lot of experience in the dental space, as many of you know. The way that we go to market and we approach this segment is four-fold. Everything starts for us by looking at the end-to-end workflow. Where does it start, and what is the end product that you need to have?
We're not just looking at the piece in the middle that involves the 3D printers, but making sure that we understand the full piece so that we can engage and work with our customers on the full length of it. From there, we leverage our hardware, printer hardware technology. We've got the broadest in the industry when you think about the different metals offerings that we have, as well as the plastics resin side. We combine that then with a series of materials that we develop in-house with the right properties to address the indications that we need and have the regulatory clearance to be able to sell in the major markets. The fourth piece, this is really a strong point of differentiation for us, is we build really intimate relationships with our customers through service and hands-on training.
The picture that you see there on the lower left, that's actually of one of our facilities in the Netherlands, where we've taken a large room and basically equipped it the same way as a dental lab would be equipped, right? With the long benches, the lighting, all the different tools and equipment, and we run service training in there. We bring lab techs into that facilities, walk them through the entire workflow hands-on and make it so native to their normal operating environment that they leave there and say, "Yep, we've done it. We've got it. We can go now do this within our own workspace." Extremely powerful.
The way that we commercialize this is by basically focusing on each of the major subsegments of the dental market and then looking at the different players that we have within the ecosystem and building solutions for each of them. If you think about orthodontics, right, our history in the aligner space is well known. We've got solutions there using our large platforms that are extremely well suited for high volume OEMs and large dental labs. We've also got solutions for smaller players, right? Your mid to small dental labs, as well as DSOs or dental clinics, mostly around our NextDent platform hardware, together with a series of materials that enables the production of splints, aligners, placement of traditional braces and so on. We've got a bunch of parts set up outside.
Hopefully, you've got a chance either during a break or afterwards to take a look. Both industrial and healthcare parts outside will help bring these things to life a little more. Prosthodontics, so this is basically restorations to teeth. It's the simple way to think about it. We've got metal offerings here that allow labs to print crowns or partial dentures, removable partial dentures built in a metal framework. We've got MJP printer that is being used for making high-precision planning models. Our NextDent platform, where we now have materials that allow us to make permanent crown restorations as well as dentures and a number of other, supporting tools. Implantology. Name's kind of what you think, right? Implanting teeth.
Metal printers to start a show here, allowing labs to print the structural components that go into the mouth in order to accept the implanted teeth. On the NextDent side, we have printers and materials to make planning models and surgical guides for where the drilling and cutting needs to occur. The other thing that I wanna highlight on here is you see that Oqton box kind of tied in throughout. This is the Oqton software. You'll hear more about that from Ben. Extremely efficient workflow for the dental space. Already getting a lot of traction in there, and it's being very well received in the marketplace for managing dental operations. If we stay with personalization, really up to this point, we've talked predominantly around personalizing at the manufacturing point.
What we're seeing now is that line between manufacturer and point-of-care provider is beginning to blur. You saw it on the dental side. You've heard about it in the radiation oncology side, where we said, "Hey, we can do things," and the clinic is starting to manufacture and make things of their own. You're starting to see that across the general healthcare system as well, right? Your kind of more broad-based hospitals and clinics. Personalizing here at that point of care gives you very similar benefits, right? You get better patient outcomes, you save time, you save money, yeah? Gives you an opportunity to address patient needs that otherwise aren't getting addressed.
Then this new one, new within the last two years, there's been increasing pressure for really any kinds of organizations to get greater control over their supply chain, and it includes hospitals. They're becoming increasingly interested in taking more manufacturing in-house, on-site. You're starting to see more research, more publications, more conversations happening on this topic. The FDA is getting involved and basically starting to solicit comment and trying to investigate how should we regulate manufacturing at the point of care, because historically it hasn't been that widespread. You're even starting to see large hospital systems starting to deploy this within their organizations. For example, the Veterans Affairs, right?
Largest hospital systems within the U.S., they signed a contract with us, and they are actively in the process of deploying different 3D printing technologies at the point of care for the very reasons that we've talked about. The type of solutions that we make available to the point of care systems, it's really the same ones that we've been talking about here. It's implants, personalized instruments, anatomical models, surgical planning services, the software to do all these things, and then the printers and materials for making it happen. We've got a flexible deployment model to bring that to market. It starts with, on one hand, having a complete turnkey on-site managed service model, where we basically agree with the hospital that they give us a room within the facilities.
We'll bring the equipment, we'll bring the materials, we'll staff it, we'll run it, and essentially open up an order window where we deliver whatever it is they're asking for. The other end of the spectrum, the training and deployment, is where we basically sell the technology to the hospital, the consumables and materials that are needed, train them on the utilization of it, stand them up, so they basically run it themselves, and we step back. The middle ground, there's the collateral solution, is where we basically take different parts of the work and divide it up between us. For example, hospital would come to us and say, "Look, we've got this patient data. We want you, 3D Systems, to go ahead and do all the surgical planning for this cases.
Send the digital files back to us, and then we will print them on-site with printers that we will purchase from you, and then make those parts available by basically printing them on-demand ourselves at the hospital." Lots of different ways that this is coming together. Yeah. Beyond our traditional, let's say, legacy portfolio of plastics and metals, we're excited now also to really be on the cusp of a very interesting first-to-market opportunity in point of care with 3D-printed PEEK. PEEK is a material that's already well-known within the medical sector, predominantly as a milled material used for cranial restorations.
Works, people are comfortable with it, but being able to 3D print it, we now are able to say, "Hey, you can do the same thing, but it's cheaper to make, faster to make, lasts less messy, and you can start designing geometries on here that you can't do with traditional milled methodology." Exciting prospects. The thing that's particularly neat about this particular technical platform is it's a very user-friendly, very environmentally friendly printer device that is actually suitable for placement inside the hospital, relatively close to the operating room theater. You can make a very on-demand, real-time solution with that. That kinda covers off where I wanna stop with respect to talking about our existing technology, right? And then kind of make this transition over what we're now doing on the pharmaceutical side in the future.
If you think about the way drugs are being developed today, right? It starts with Petri dish work. If you're successful with that, move on to small animal studies, then larger animal studies, and then ultimately clinical trials into the human body, hopefully followed by FDA approval to bring the drug to market. It's an extremely lengthy process. It could take 12 years, yeah, if you could follow this process end to end like this. Expensive, more than $2.5 billion by the time you get the drug approved. An extremely low success rate. Right? Only one out of ten actually makes it through all the way to the end. With bioprinting technology, we think we've got an attractive alternative coming here.
Basically, what we can do is by using a bioprinting technology, we can create small models and devices using human tissue that you can utilize during those early test phases that allow you to test more complex scenarios earlier, getting fast results, right? Fail fast, learn fast. It's highly scalable. You can replicate these devices. Gives you an opportunity to do really high throughput screening. Right? Lots of different candidate formulations that you can test simultaneously versus having to do things sequentially. Speed up there. The final benefit is with this and these predictable results that you're getting, you can actually see a path now towards reducing the reliance on animal testing. We're bringing this to market kind of twofold. First, we've got a research platform.
This is the acquisition of the Allevi business that we made last year, where we have a small printer device that we sell into the market with bioinks. We've got about 500 or so these deployed out into the market with different kind of labs. We're getting very good feedback on how people are using these devices, what kind of research that they're doing and so on. That knowledge, we can now translate into the conversations that we wanna have with the pharmaceutical companies and say, "Here is the kind of research that you can do with this. It's been proven. It's being used out there.
You can trust it." That's where we wanna get involved with those companies, not just with selling them these devices and products, but also offering these services, these research services to them on an outsourced basis. As we evolve with that, in time, get to a place where really now start to develop in-depth, long-term partnerships with these pharmaceutical companies for those development cycles of specific drugs. That's the path that we're on with the bioprinting side here. Again, you'll hear the other chapter of it this evening about what we're doing with respect to regenerative medicine applications that go inside the body. Here's what I wanna leave with you. When we talked about those trends for the industry overall, healthcare is a growing business. There's no questions.
The trends that are driving this, particularly for us, is the effectiveness and the benefits of using 3D printing to manufacture these devices. Personalization, right? Starting by collaboration with the manufacturers, and then bringing that to the point of care, and then accelerating these long and expensive pharmaceutical development cycles. In that context, if you now look at us as a company, we've got more history, depth of application knowledge, and breadth of offerings than anybody else out there in the industry. You put those two together, and you'll see why we're excited about the growth prospects for this business. Thank you. With this, I wanna turn it over to Reji, who will present the Industrial Solutions Group.
Thanks, Menno. Again, thanks again for everybody coming in this afternoon, and look forward to spending some time with you today now and then, and then later on in the evening as well. As we go through and talk about this section around industrial, it's really an opportunity to just continue to amplify the areas that Jeff had spoke about earlier with respect to where we focus and how we build. Each day, we hear about more and more challenges facing the marketplace, whether it's supply chain or elements like that. There's also a whole series of trends that are evolving as companies accelerate what they're doing.
If you think about connected factory, the need for productivity, the de-globalization that's happening, cost management, speed to market, and sustainability, each of those provide tailwinds as we think about additive, and specifically in a lot of the areas that 3D Systems is working in. We'll talk about that today as we go through. Now, one of the things that I kind of joke about with respect to Menno and myself is Menno's entire industry within healthcare is the body, right? The human body. That everything that he spoke about is replacing parts, adding to the human body. If you think about everything else that exists in the universe, it's what I cover, right? That can be overwhelming, as one would think. What we try to do is focus in a few high-value segments.
Examples of those are here. It's around aerospace, transportation, semiconductor, consumer tech, energy, jewelry, academics, and service bureaus of manufacturing, which even then become large-scale opportunities. What we've done is in addition to the organization that Jeff talked about, industrial and healthcare, within the industrial team, we've also built segment teams. Within each of these areas, we have dedicated teams of people in terms of understanding those customers, developing applications, and then going through a process of helping them solve problems and offering them a series of portfolio of offerings. What you see here is estimates, 'cause that's all they can be, of serviceable market.
The takeaway here is there are significant growth opportunities in each of these areas we play in, and a lot of opportunity for just ongoing growth as we dig in and expand what they're even doing now. If we look at the way we think about markets, it's really in two dimensions. One is, and Jeff shared earlier, if you think about the advantages of additive, speed to market, design freedom, intelligent manufacturing. You guys have heard all those. You know all those. Then you think about the needs of a specific industry that can vary. I mean, the needs of a jewelry industry vary dramatically from that of a space company, but they share a lot of the ultimate benefits of additive. What we're able to do is, when possible, we share information back and forth across the segments.
Importantly, we have a deep understanding of these segments and then can develop solutions based on that. I'll give you some examples in a little bit as we kinda walk through that. As we look at growth. You know, there are a bunch of different ways you can think about how an industry can grow. We've kind of one of the elements is to look at a couple vectors here. One is production volume. How big of a market is it in terms of how much are they gonna produce? What are they gonna do? The other thing is, if you think about the part cost, the part value, for example. If you look in the top right, connectors. An individual connector may be pennies or dollars. Right? Individual connector itself is not very valuable.
If you look at the volume at a connector company, for example, and the long tail that they have and the tooling costs associated with that, to take just a small percentage of that tail and move it into something like this, represents a huge opportunity for growth with respect to dependence on software, on, material productivity, machine precision. That's an area where you have huge volumes, maybe a low part value, but huge volumes associated with that. If you contrast that with the bottom left, there you have let's think about semiconductor, and we're gonna go into more detail in a minute, where you may be making, you know, hundreds of part, not millions of parts, but the value of those parts are huge, is significant. It gives us a lot of growth opportunity there.
If you look at in the upper left, things like space or jewelry. Again, we'll talk more about jewelry, where the outcome part is hugely valuable, and there's a lot of volume associated with it. Each of those areas provides us opportunities to grow and expand. One of the examples, you know, you can hear talk about applications, but it's hard to really kind of begin to think about what that means, and we use the word over and over again. I want to go through a few examples. The one I want to dig into a little bit is around semiconductor. If you think about semiconductor fabrication equipment, that equipment can cost more than $100 million for that machine. We all are experiencing, in some form or fashion, some.
We see the delays of semiconductors right now and the need to expand production as EVs grow and other things grow. A lot of companies are expanding. In addition to that, if you're a consumer or buyer of that machine, if you're spending $100 million on a machine, you want that to have productivity, you want it to have precision, and a lot of the things that you need can be answered with additive. We're partnering in that process. We're working with Wilting who has an OEM customer. They're a tier one. We work with both of them, and we are working on improving the overall performance. With that, we have the application team. We, in this case, are working with the 350, the metal machine.
We're working with our 3DXpert and the other software on that. You see a series on the right-hand side of that slide, the types of applications we end up with, whether it's the manifold fluid flow, the shower head, the wafer table. Because you think about it, you're talking about the diameter, I mean, atoms that you're trying to manage on that. You want precision. You don't want things to move. You need it to be cool. These are things that additive can do. You'll see when you have a chance on the back table out there, these parts. We've worked with them. I wanna show you a video, and then I'm gonna come back to this a little bit. The result is improved productivity, improved performance, part reliability, design flexibility, all the things.
Again, if you're buying a $100 million machine, these are the kind of things that make that machine better and make it more productive, so.
Wilting is a manufacturer of high precision mechanics. Semiconductor customers are pushing their technologies to the limit. They are continuously pressured to go to smaller chips, producing them in a faster manner. That means that their equipment needs to be faster and more accurate all the time. Working with 3D Systems opened up a lot of opportunities for Wilting to support our customers.
A large OEM in the semiconductor space that Wilting was already working with, they were upgrading more and more of their precision components with internal complex channels. These had to be made at production scale in a reliable and repeatable way with a combination of metal additive manufacturing and precision machining. This is where Wilting and 3D Systems really found each other to make these components together.
When we start working together, 3D Systems took responsibility for the production of the AM parts. Wilting post-machines those parts, assembled them, and qualified them. Working together, we combine best of both worlds. Here we were able to support our customers with best-in-class solutions for their manufacturability challenges.
We chose the 3D Systems DMP Flex 350 system because of its high productivity, excellent surface quality, high density, resulting in strong parts and seamless integration of the 3DXpert software. Having a stable volume production process in metal AM requires more than just buying the equipment. It requires engineered out print files, well-documented post-processing and quality controls, among other things. In our technology transfer, 3D Systems offers to develop these in-house and then transfer all required documents to the customer, as well as train them on this, so they can hit the ground running with their production process after they purchase the equipment.
Now that we have the capabilities of AM more and more in-house, we see also the demand from our customers increase, not only the parts that are already in production, but also new parts we now introduce.
This partnership is very exciting because by combining 3D Systems capabilities and Wilting capabilities, we achieve a tighter vertical integration. This helps us significantly increase our time to market for new products.
Working with 3D Systems has been very exciting. First of all, we got access to the AM technology, which made it possible for us to offer our semicon customers new applications like heat exchangers and manifolds. Nowadays, we are exploring with 3D Systems aerospace opportunities, where topology optimization is an important feature. 3D Systems, Wilting, and the engineers of our customers work together to optimize the design for AM technology.
As you listen to the story there with the Wilting team and our team, really what it does is articulate exactly what Menno shared as well as what Jeff shared. What we began with is working with the OEM and with Wilting is to really understand what parts of that machine are suitable for additive. You know, really ground up. Developing the application and the topology optimization, whatever it might be around that to work with that. In the case of the manifold, which is the picture there, and you'll see it in the back desk, is really to say, "Okay, we need to solve that problem, and here's how we're gonna do it with additives." We go through the process of developing that.
Our team, in this case, it was in Leuven, actually begins to produce that on our machines, validates it in a production scenario, and then we began to do some bridge production there, right? Because they're not ready. The Tier one is not ready to invest yet. They need some parts to make sure it's really gonna work. They see it's gonna work, then our goal is to transfer. We don't wanna become a service bureau for them. We're trying to move it over to them. They begin to take that, produce those parts, implement it, and then they, like you saw in the very early video, they're actually gonna buy another machine, he said.
The benefit of that is we can also become an opportunity where something goes down or they are in a process where they need to scale up. We're there as well as safety production. It really is that left to right approach around how we're going from ideation to validation to really scaling up from this whole process. Another example is motorsports. You know, you hear us talk a lot about F1. I mean, we work with almost every one of the F1 teams, especially in the wind tunnels and a lot of the work on the PIV there. This is an example, and again, he was in a very early story that was played with Rodin Cars in New Zealand, which are focused on single track hypercars.
In this situation, they have a number of our products. We do a lot of things, but they were really trying to redesign a gearbox to be able to create both the hardening as well as the lightweighting and just the overall performance. In this case, our application teams in Littleton worked with them, designed the product, and worked through a whole series of development efforts with their teams, and now with the DMP 500 as well as some of the software work. We've got that there with them as well as working with them in castings and some of the other polymer base. Again, working through how do we take knowledge of what we have in motorsports and the specifics of this customer to then design something that works for them.
One of the big pieces here is what we are not doing is just selling printers. We're really having a complex offering to sell a solution that answers and makes their life easier from that perspective. Jewelry is something you may have heard about from us speak about before, but you know, if you really think about jewelry in a lot of ways, it is the most some of the most precise castings, right? I mean, the level of work that has to be done around the high precision, some of like, you know, Jeff called it like precision micro casting, because that's really what it is. Historically, within jewelry, it was done through tooling, you know, creating a tool which is expensive or hand carving.
What we've done though is kinda created a whole digital workflow from the idea of building the software to build the process to the machine and the wax and the supports. You can see it again in the back. You'll see a little box with red wax. That process has enabled. There was a company called Emo who we were working with who does a lot with. They're a supplier to a lot of large jewelry companies. What we were able to do with them is to improve their productivity significantly. Both the lead time, the number of patterns they can do in hours, the ability for them to create new things that would be very difficult to do with hand carving or tooling or expensive with tooling.
Also with the casting and the burn off, so you don't have a lot of residue, you don't have a lot of those elements there when they produce it. Just an overall reduced cost, because if you can imagine the cost in hand carving some of these pieces versus what we're able to do. This actually is a growing part of our marketplace in an area that truly benefits from understanding what happens. The benefit of this, we actually, to show how we go back and forth, a lot of the workflow that we identified here was workflow we had identified in dental. By taking knowledge about what we had in dental, we were able to put it into this and benefit from that and grow that part of it.
The last example here is around space. You know, as you think about private space, you think about the growth in space and what's happening, there's a lot of opportunity, and we do a lot of work in that. Well, one of the areas around propulsion is. The purpose of this story here is to talk both about, you know, you think about the breadth of our offerings, 'cause Jeff talks about that. You know, the benefit of that is we can have a level of almost agnostic as we think about the best solution. We're not forcing everybody into a metal solution. We're not forcing everybody into a polymer solution. We're able to think about what is best.
In this example with propulsion, in some cases, what we realize is our QuickCast Diamond, which is an amazing product. You can actually see it out there. You'll see the drill bit that's used for out there behind the table, about the opportunity to create complex designs in something that can be burned off and turned into metal. We do some of that here with this. Other situations, we have the opportunity to use metal and direct print with DMP, with the 350 or the 500 in some of the thrust chambers and injectors. The flexibility there, as well as a lot of our application engineers coming out of space teams, helps us to understand that. We were able to kinda create a solution in this case, and continuing to expand our opportunities within space around this area.
You know, what we see is over the past period of time since we did the reorganization, is that the approach like this is translating itself into financial performance as well. You know, the difference in 2020- 2021, you know, you have a lot of growth that was happening with respect to that. But then we also see it even now as we move into 2022, we're seeing the double-digit growth continue. We expect as we go through, and Wayne will talk about it, as we continue to grow the opportunities here. As you look at really what we're trying to say and kind of really reiterate here, is within the sector, within the industrial market, it is a large and expanding set of opportunities.
They are, you know, it is everything outside the human body, but we're also focused on some core areas. Within those core areas, we have significant platforms for growth. It's the customers that want additives, and we have solutions that they need. The other thing is, again, we are doing far more than just pushing a box, pushing a printer. We are creating a solution and a set of application expertise that allows those customers to rely on us in order to be able to grow their business, and we're able to benefit from that growth as well. The third part is around the full solution. Applications, materials, software, systems allows us to do those first two buckets. That portfolio of offerings is critical for our ability to sustain the things that Menno and I were talking about with respect to applications.
We're gonna pivot now in the presentations a little bit now from the application orientation of industrial and healthcare, and begin to allow you to have a chance to hear more from the specific verticals, I mean the offerings. Ben Schrauwen is gonna come up and talk a little bit about the software with Oqton and how we're working in that. Then after that, we'll take a break, and then David Leigh will be sharing around the other parts of our portfolio. With that, Ben.
Good. Thank you. Well, maybe I'm relatively new to the team, so I joined 3D Systems back in November with the acquisition of Oqton. I'll maybe just start it briefly giving some background about myself. I used to be a professor in machine learning and robotics about 15 years ago. I was at Autodesk, a large software company in the manufacturing space, was heading their advanced manufacturing division. From there, I then co-founded Oqton that was recently acquired. The reason I started Oqton is because we really saw this amazing trend in the manufacturing industry where every company we talked to being like a large automotive OEM or a consumer goods company or even like small SMEs, like being suppliers for larger companies, everyone was being disrupted.
Those, like, batch sizes were getting smaller, lead times were getting shorter. The classical approach, which was developed over the last decades, where this very waterfall model that led to getting the costs down, actually now is becoming really a hindrance and is making it very difficult for companies to innovate quickly enough. Also several very innovative processes were coming of age, like leveraging, like industrial robots, five-axis milling stations, complex 3D printing processes where there's a giant skill gap. Like a lot of these machines need extremely well-trained engineers to program them, and they are less and less available in the market.
Of course, like this incredible push, especially the last couple of years, around sustainability and de-globalization, where a lot of that manufacturing expertise really needs to be brought back, the current software approach and the current tools really weren't able to solve these problems. That's why we started Oqton. To give you a bit of a sense of what it's all about, I'll use this one additive example. It's a customer use case. The part you see here is the insert inserted into a large control valve. Like a big control valve like this.
Like the part is inside of the control valve, and it really controls the pressure flow properties of these control valves. A great use case by a customer of ours, Emerson. If you look at the typical end cost of one of these additively produced parts, you can split it up in pre-sales and engineering efforts. You need to design this part. You really need to take into account the limitations of the additive process and design for the process. There is a big machine write-off component. If you actually look to like on average, the utilization of 3D printer equipment, on average in the industry is about 30%. There's a lot of like underutilization still, and that's where there's a big write-off component in the cost of a part.
There's material and operators, which actually are quite small. Very often there is also a sizable post-processing cost where support needs to be removed. You might have to do some post-machining actions. If we really think about it, a lot of those big costs can be significantly reduced through better use of software. It's discovery of the additive use cases. How can we discover which application additive can be a real benefit? How can we make it easier to then design for the additive process? How can we increase the productivity of the equipment and the overall operation? 3D printing is also always part of a larger complete production workflow. Like it's, we're not just building prototype parts. This is a real production part. It needs to be heat-treated, post-machined, and that might need to be assembled.
It's additive as part of a whole production process. Then, of course, quality is also really key. Back in the prototyping days, the part needed to look good. Now the part also needs to have fit and function. Quality is becoming more and more important in the additive space. There's all kinds of tools out there in the market. Companies trying to do this now need to buy 10 different licenses of all different types of software and jury-rig it together themselves and use Excel sheets to manage everything. What we try to do with Oqton is to get all of this into a singular platform.
Like, yeah, so we've seen cases, and we really believe that software can, like a proper interconnected software platform approach across these three different areas can really reduce part cost by 10x. Which actually means that many more applications can be done with additive, because getting the part cost down, suddenly there is much more business cases that become viable for the additive process. Software can be an incredible enabler for accelerating the adoption of additive. That's why 3D Systems has invested heavily in building out the software team. I'll just go in a bit more detail in each of these areas. I'll go quite quickly, some of these things are a bit more technical. For example, we need to be...
We need to give tools that make it. All companies have giant catalogs of parts, tens of thousands of parts in their PLM system. You need to be able to discover, okay, which one of these parts can really benefit from additive. It's not just the geometry, but it's the overall, like, supply chain complexity, it's inventory management, like, demand forecasts, which really can drive this business case analysis. There is using software to better control the process. Like, for example, the no support technology that was already developed. It's like, how can you, using software, drive these machines better so you need less support, you can increase the accuracy, you can reduce the failures? Making additive more applicable to more different use cases. DFAM is getting more and more important.
A lot of the tools that people use to design parts, CAD. CAD was really designed in the seventies to work very well for machined parts. In additive, we have much more design flexibility, and we really need a whole new set of design tools that can design lattices and implicit surface and these generative designs that really with the least amount of material can still support all the loads needed. Lastly, simulation. Like, having to do multiple print iterations to then really find out if the part will actually work is quite expensive, like, both in time as well as the cost of all these prints. Using simulation technology, we can actually predict where these parts will fail, where will they crack, how do we need to support them.
Again, like improving this discovery phase for which are the applications that we can do with additive. The second big chunk is productivity. Okay, once we've identified the parts, the use case has been acknowledged, the design is done, now we need to produce them at scale. It's very important that we can have a production management environment that's fully tied to all of the different business systems. Because in the additive case, very often you use mass customized parts. Every order and different design needs to be generated, and we need to have full traceability from the CRM and ERP system all the way down to production. That's something that can be provided through Oqton.
Because of this mass customization, every part can be different, which means there can be very repetitive engineering tasks, like quoting and bill preparation and nesting and all of that. Like, especially from my history in machine learning, we're taking a lot of the state-of-the-art in deep learning and AI and applying that now in the production environment. Like, where are the opportunities to really reduce the repetitive engineering tasks and assist engineers, so engineers can only focus on the difficult cases and don't have to do all of the same repetitive work every day. There's of course the end-to-end. Like I mentioned, additive is always part of a much more complex production chain. If you need post...
complex post-processing and machining, this can all be captured in the software. Then there's traceability. Very often these parts are required in regulated environments, and so we need full traceability of the powders, the training levels of the people, like the maintenance schedules of the machines. Everything needs to be traceable to guarantee these regulatory requirements. Good. Then lastly, there's quality. How can we now make sure that once the parts are produced, they're actually up to the specifications that are required? Here there is a number of different things that we're working on.
There is monitoring the additive process itself using melt pool techniques, thermal or visual techniques that we can then analyze in context of how the part is prepared. There is material property-specific capabilities, like for example, porosities and things like that. There's geometrical quality control, which we can leverage the Geomagic portfolio. Then there's actually analyzing all the sensors that are in the machines themselves, like monitoring oxygen concentrations and things like that continuously during the production process, and then being able to perform predictive maintenance in aspects like this. Like, all these aspects are all the different things we're working on towards the puzzle to then get to being able to significantly drive down the cost of parts using software.
All of this is coming together into the Oqton Manufacturing OS, which is an end-to-end production platform, cloud-based, works very well with additive, but it also supports many other production technologies like industrial robots and CNC machines to really allow us to automate the complete end-to-end process. This was started by my company, Oqton, acquired within 3D Systems, and now is integrated within the 3D Systems software portfolio. I'll give a bit more detail. First, a quick video of how 3D Systems uses Oqton within their Littleton facility.
While Oqton meets all of our current requirements, we have visions for what other capabilities we might like to see in a manufacturing operating system. It's been very enlightening to hear what Oqton's roadmap is and the future enhancements they have planned, and we can't wait to implement these in our own system so we can further increase our capabilities using Oqton. This site serves as a service bureau using 3D Systems printers, materials, and software to produce products for medical device and aerospace customers.
I'm Jeph Ruppert. I'm the Director of the Application Innovation Group here at 3D Systems in Denver, Colorado.
My name is Keith Flood. I'm the Director of Operations.
As the complexity of the manufacturing of a single part increases, the importance of traceability and pedigree also increases. The ability to control both the manufacturing inputs and the manufacturing outputs, whether it's inspection data, nondestructive testing data, et c, having the ability to control all of this within a single ecosystem, with a single digital data package that describes the pedigree of a part, is incredibly important and incredibly valuable.
Historically, we've managed the documentation of all of our builds in a paper traveler system. The amount of labor that we have spent internally in tracking down and storing and filling out these paper travelers has been an enormous burden on our business. We're really looking forward to the reduction of labor that an electronic traveler system, the manufacturing operating system like Oqton, will provide for us to improve our compliance, reduce labor, and improve our focus on the actual parts we produce, as opposed to the administrative overhead of the paperwork required by our regulatory agencies.
Being able to connect all these tools together in a visual way will allow us to understand where pain points are occurring and ultimately get to a point where we can see before they're occurring what's going to be happening and plan ahead for those things.
We expect to improve our scalability and our ability to produce more parts with the same number of resources.
I think that the team at Oqton is uniquely positioned to understand the nuance and context of these issues, to solve them in the most efficient and effective manner. For customers that are looking to scale additive manufacturing, I'd recommend Oqton simply because they're backed by a team of experts that know what they're doing. They live and breathe additive, and they've lived and breathed additive for many years, understanding the complexity and nuance of the challenges that are encountered in the industry and finding unique and efficient ways to solve those challenges.
Good. This is one of many customers where Oqton is deployed. This was 3D Systems. Very easy to get some very nice imagery. Similar, like how the rest of the 3D Systems business is structured, we also focus extensively on business verticals. We have a team really focused on dental and medical application and a team focused on industrial applications. In the dental use cases, we see Oqton very often adopted because of its unique capabilities to drastically automate the preparation of 3D printing and CNC programming, all within one software for crown and bridge production, dentures, clear aligners.
All the way from very small companies with just a couple machines, all the way to some of the largest dental producers in the world are using Oqton. On the medical device production space, so very similar to the Littleton facility you saw earlier. This is implant surgical guides, instruments where traceability is very, very important and especially like the FDA, like with Part 11 compliance traceability. This is one of these things we focused on extensively. There is the service bureau businesses or often what's also called these internal service bureaus.
There are large industrial manufacturing companies that have this internal service bureau set up, where Oqton is very often used across multiple facilities geographically, all managed from one software, where you can then do full order tracking, MES, integrated bill preparation. We work on every different type of equipment from all the different vendors, not only the printers but also the heat treatment CNC machines. All of that can be connected to the same platform. Good. We're also quite active in aerospace and defense, where we again offer full traceability, we can be fully ITAR compliant, and we see a lot of demand in that area as well. It's very important with this platform that we really form an open ecosystem.
Like our customers have equipment from all the different vendors, and it's very important for them that they have one platform that doesn't force them into one type of equipment, but they can just keep expanding and keep adding equipment. So Oqton always was very open and neutral. We already have agreements, like integrations and very often also reseller agreements with a lot of the partners shown on the slide here, which is really to the benefit of the customers. Like this, like playing in this very open ecosystem, Oqton is also built on very open APIs. Others can also build on top of our software if they want. Well, maybe a few words on how the acquisition was structured.
Oqton was an independent company acquired by 3D Systems in November, but then we really decided to keep the Oqton brand to represent 3D Systems' software strategy. The existing teams within 3D Systems actually joined the Oqton software organization. It's a separate business unit that will be 100% focused on software and is like all of the business functions are in that business unit, so marketing, sales, research and development. We're actually setting up like a data firewall between the Oqton organization and the rest of 3D Systems that will be externally audited to guarantee that neutrality, where we can work with all the other machine OEMs without any risk of potential IP from these machine OEMs leaking into the main 3D Systems.
That neutrality, we take it very serious and we're going to significant lengths to really ensure that we can stay both a neutral brand as well as guarantee that IP protection. After the acquisition, now the team very significantly has grown, and we're really able to accelerate. There's also a big commitment from 3D Systems to keep accelerating and keep investing in software. Like we mentioned back in November that we have a target to reach about $100 million in recurring revenue by the end of 2025. It will be a very significant contributor to high margin and high growth revenue for 3D Systems.
All of the existing assets, 3DXpert, 3D Sprint, Geomagic, are all part of the Oqton portfolio now and will all be integrated in a unifying strategy. The unified software strategy, I'll just go very quick. This, there's Oqton Manufacturing OS, which is what I described before. It can do everything from managing, designing, managing the printing process all the way down to inspection. There's a lot of these desktop products that existed before, so the Geomagic portfolio, 3DXpert, Amphyon, which was another acquisition that happened about a year ago, and then the Control X software. We're going to make all of these different desktop products, we're going to make them cloud connected.
There's a lot of benefits, both from a workflow perspective, collaboration perspective, as well as the ability to take some of the Oqton AI algorithms and assist workflows within these desktop tools. We're going to take some of the core IP that's in these desktop products, make it available as services within the cloud, and then making it so that these services can connect very well to scanners, printers, other manufacturing equipment. This is kind of like how both the Oqton cloud strategy as well as the legacy desktop products really come together into a unified software platform that will be also open for third parties to easily connect into. Good. That was it for me. We now have a short break. I think it's about 15 minutes.
After that, David Leigh will give an overview of the hardware developments. Thank you.
It's the best or the worst place to be right after the break, 'cause sometimes people are like, "Man, it doesn't seem like there's as many people as there was." But it looks like we got everybody back. I'll let people slow roll in. I'll give you a little bit of introduction about myself. I'm gonna make this a little more interactive if that's okay, guys. Is that okay? I can't really see you because they've got these bright spotlights. But based on my hairline, you probably can't see me either because those bright lights are probably shining back at you. So my name is David Leigh. I joined 3D Systems about a year ago as their Chief Technology for Additive. I've been in the industry since its inception, for the most part.
I worked in the laser sintering world, which was a technology that was acquired by 3D Systems in 2001. I started in 1990. I started out, you know, in materials development, and then we started figuring out that there was problems with lasers, so then I got into that. We've had to figure out how do you calibrate it, and then once you calibrate it in a lab, how do you take that somewhere else, where somebody's put it in a garage and they don't have air conditioning, and how are you gonna maintain and calibrate that? I transferred into field service. From that, I opened a service bureau. I ran a service bureau for about 20 years.
I'm a practitioner of the technology. I was a customer of 3D Systems before I've joined them. I've got a unique perspective on the industry as well as my role. In field service, I found that there was two roles of field service. One role was to placate the customer because expectations were too high, and so we need to send field service out to make them feel better. Now, they may not be able to fix it, but at least there's a guy there that looks like he's trained, and I think the patient is getting better. We have hope that he will survive the patient being their machine. The other thing is we found that we were also sat sometimes on the side of engineering.
They didn't quite finish the product, but the ship date said it was supposed to ship today, so they shipped it. We would go out, and we would be an extension of manufacturing and engineering and trying to fix all that. That perspective has really tempered my opinion on what my role as chief technology officer is. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna tell a story. I've got two props. Okay? We've got two props. I'm gonna use two props, and I'm gonna tell the story. Every good story has a good protagonist and a good antagonist. One of the best, I don't know, best movies ever when it had a really good, well-defined antagonist was probably The Empire Strikes Back. Anybody ever watch that? Anybody watch it, like, live?
Like when you had to wait at The Empire Strikes Back and poor Han Solo is frozen in carbonite, and you had to wait, like, three years. I mean, it's not on Netflix. It's not like you. There's no leaks. I mean, you had to wait, and you didn't know. You gotta resolve that tension. What I found out as I've gotten older is, for all of you English majors, which I was. Reason I did engineering is so I could do math and didn't have to read books. One of the things about about any good balance of good and evil, protagonist, antagonist is the fight. It's What is it? Man against man against himself, man against nature. I don't think it's very popular.
I think man against God or divinity or whatever was kinda maybe a fourth one, but I think we boiled it down to three. You need to have all three of those elements, and one of the things that that teased out is while you may say Darth Vader is the worst enemy in the world, and we wanna have all the rebels go attack that, Luke Skywalker had to deal with man against himself. In order to beat the enemy outside, you have to beat the enemy inside. My job is to beat the enemy inside. I'm gonna walk you through that. I'm gonna talk about our technology, and I'm gonna talk about what we're doing to make sure we defeat the enemy inside. Before I do that, obviously none of that was on a slide.
If you have the little bottle opener, any Church of Christ, Baptists, any, you know, the I guess it could be used for grape bottles. But anyway, beer bottles mostly. If you look at that's titanium. Built on our machine using our software, and this is what we call topology optimization. If you're familiar and you've been in the industry for a long time, it makes sense. If you've not been in the industry a long time, this is what topology optimization does. It's one of the things that our 3DXpert software can allow you to do. Actually decrease the weights, maintain the same strength and rigidity that you would have for a solid part, but basically remove everything that isn't needed for the function.
This is just a really good tool to illustrate what can be done with additive that you can't really do well other places. This is a lot of the reason why our customers are going to additive is because it's lightweighting, which is more sustainable. It uses less material, which is more sustainable, and sustainability is a big deal. Anyway, that's that part. Anyway, it was built. I can't remember the orientation. I think generally it was built standing up, so they were attached to the plate, and so we obviously have to disconnect it. We cut it off of the plate, but other than that, we did not use supports. That's also an enemy to additive is anything that we have to build that the customer doesn't need, right?
It's support material that's built. It's material that's used that doesn't need to be used, but we had to use it for manufacturing. It's time-wasting. It's material wasting. It adds complexity when you don't want complexity. One of the holy grails of metal manufacturing is supportless printing, and I think you've heard that a couple of times today. We're not the only ones that know how to do it. I think some others probably propagandize that more than we do. But it's something that all metal manufacturers, including us, do, and a big part of that is software. The good thing for us is we have probably the broadest suite of software that allows us to do that. Amphyon, which is one of the companies that was acquired.
Ironically, I was at EOS when AM Ventures, it's Dr. Langer, so he's the owner of EOS. His AM Ventures actually invested in a start-up with Amphyon, so it was one of the AM Ventures German companies. I was there as an EOS employee when they were saying, "Hey, 3D Systems looks like 3D Systems is gonna buy that. What do you think?" We talked about that. We, again, good protagonist, antagonist, and it's amazing how things change. Anyway, I'm gonna dive through this. I'm gonna pause a couple of times. Please, if you wanna ask a question, deep dive on a thing, just let me know, and I will stop, and we will back up. I'm gonna walk through it.
The first thing is to know about the protagonist. For me, the protagonist for us is 3D Systems. We're the hero. Obviously, we think we're the hero 'cause that's we've got the name badge. But this is our history. With every good hero, we also have a dark side to us. One of the good things about 3D Systems is we are probably the richest as far as technology. We are the richest as far as the length and the depth of what we've done. We've developed a lot of tools that are being used today in the industry, or they've taken derivatives of what we've done. The problem is we're one of the oldest in the industry. With an older person, you know, old habits die hard or can't teach an old dog new tricks.
There's obviously a lot of younger startups will point to companies like 3D Systems and say they really can't keep up. What we have to do is push against that. You can see here what we've done, and there's a lot of stuff that we've done, we've acquired. Probably the best applications story you've seen today is probably some of the healthcare in the acquisition of Medical Modeling, which was in Littleton. As a service bureau, I address primarily polymer. I was innovating in around polymer materials being used in aerospace. Andy Christensen at Medical Modeling was primarily metals used in medical. Then we had several others that were out there.
Greg Morris was one that GE acquired and used to leverage his technology for GE Aviation, and they also bought Concept Laser. A lot of us that were the kind of the principal practitioners were all acquired by different companies. I think 3D Systems has done a good job of embedding the workflow as well as the technology focused on cranio-maxillofacial. We think we can leverage that in other areas, and you saw that in Reji's presentation of how we are able to do that with other things. I think that's one of the things that makes us pretty good. This is our technology evolution. Hopefully, you've read that while I'm going through this. I'm not gonna read the slides.
We're located, I think 30 facilities generally, many of those through acquisitions. Our core facilities, our headquarters is in Rock Hill. For me, when I joined, one of the things I found is a lot of different places were doing a lot of different things, and we had a lot of different silos. You had silos within facilities, and you also had silos within technology, core technology teams. You didn't always have a lot of integration. That kind of focus is really good, but you do need integration. I'm gonna talk about how do we fight against chaos and uncertainty when we go through R&D. These are. Leuven is shown in Europe. That's really kind of our European headquarters.
We have a Wilsonville facility, which was through acquisition of Xerox technology, that is our jetting technology. I'm gonna talk about those again a little bit later. But these are areas what I've done is focused our core centers of excellence at those facilities. Instead of trying to just put everything on one mothership and say, "We're gonna put everything, and everybody's gonna do all the same thing all the same way," I'm trying to create durable teams that can stay with the technology long term and have an area of competence, a core competence. When you think about stereolithography in Figure four, that's Chuck Hull's baby, so in California makes a lot of sense.
When we look at metals technology, it was through acquisition of a LayerWise company that is now our Direct Metal Printing. They're located in Leuven. We also have a small office in Riom, so it makes sense to let them focus on the metal. That's what we're doing, is aligning our core teams to our core technologies, so that way we can get the benefit of that. Here's who we are. When you if you go to the trade show, and I don't know how many of you, some of you guys have been in this industry a long time, some of you may be fairly new. We divide up the 3D printing world into several core technologies. One of them is what they call powder bed fusion.
Powder bed fusion is a powder that you then use some energy source to melt layer upon layer. We see that in polymers. We also see that in metals. We have that represented in our top left, is our Direct Metal Printing. Some people call it DMLS, some people call it SLM, but it's basically a laser that melts a material. The parts that you have in your hands, those bottle openers, they could or don't have to be for beer, but those bottle openers are titanium out of powder bed fusion. Also in the middle on the right is laser sintering. It also is powder bed fusion, but using a polymer instead of a metal. The advantage of that system is that it doesn't require supports. The powder actually supports it. We process it at a temperature close to.
It's kind of between a recrystallization and a melting point. The good thing about processing polymer materials is they don't shrink. Our metals materials, what happens is we process it at a melting point, but then it's almost at ambient, and so it basically melts it, and it recrystallizes or it solidifies like immediately. It builds up a lot of stresses, so you have to put supports on it. That's powder bed fusion. The next one is what we would call vat polymerization or vat photopolymer. We call that SLA, stereolithography. SLA actually stood for stereolithography apparatus. STL file was also invented as part of that. You can see a lot of people use that, but that's our laser photopolymer material with a UV laser that cures it.
Our Figure 4 printer is really kind of an offshoot of that. It's still using, instead of a laser and a point source, it actually is irradiating an area, so it's using a DLP projector similar to the projectors that are projecting these images here. You just flash that image, and it's super fast. You heard some people talking about that. We also have a MultiJet printer. This is a jetting technology. Stratasys is another one that they call theirs PolyJet. Ours is a MultiJet printer. Same general technology. There are several other companies that sell that as well.
One of the things that we're able to do there is do fairly fine detail because we're using just basically a bitmap and a jetting printer similar to what you would have in your home. Our ColorJet printer, actually, they call it CJP because it can do color, but it's binder over powder. This is what ExOne uses. It's what Desktop Metal uses. Originally it was ZCorp. It came out of a technology developed at MIT. We have that as well. Pretty much all of the technologies that are available from all the competitors that we have, we have all under one roof. One hybrid technology is a mix between the binder over powder and the powder bed fusion. It's actually in the powder bed fusion realm.
That's what HP uses and now Stratasys with our high-speed sintering. It was a technology developed by Neil Hopkinson. Basically you jet an ink that absorbs energy instead of a glue. When you flash it with a bulb, it's gonna melt everything under the bulb that has that ink on it. What you flash actually melts, and then everything else reflects the energy, and it doesn't melt. It's a fairly fast way to produce that, but we have that technology in-house as well. The one technology we really didn't have, we just acquired, and that's our extrusion printing family. You've heard Kumovis, that was acquired as a team out of Germany. They're really focused not on developing a super cool printer, but a really cool application.
Is using this extrusion technology, using a PEEK material, to then go in and build medical parts. Getting those qualified, I think is going to be really good for the industry. We will lead in that. Again, through this was inorganic, this is through that mechanism, but then my job is to take that and grow it organically. Obviously, if we're able to be successful with that and open up a market, we won't be the only ones in the market for long. We will be competing, it's my job to continue to combat the forces, right? The protagonist, antagonist, you know. For me, everybody outside is the enemy. The other one is Titan Robotics, which was acquired also about the same time, actually, maybe the same week.
Titan is out of Colorado Springs, and it's actually using additive and subtractive. We use additive to build it, and then they also have a machining head that allows them to go in and get some fine detail. What that allows us to do is go really quick and then cut the corners, right? Literally cut the corners to make sure that it's smooth. It actually makes really good parts and very large parts. There's not really an industrial player in this area that's actually functional. We really see it as good for jigs and fixtures, but we think we can do more than that.
This rounds out our portfolio, and as Jeff said, there's not a demand or a need for us to go and acquire another technology. We have all the technologies in-house. I'm gonna. Here are all the technologies in-house. One of the things that I've been talking about is we need to be launching products. Every product needs to have. Let me back up. Most people will have a portfolio roadmap. What's your roadmap, right? And when they say, "What's your roadmap?" is what products are you gonna launch when. And for me, what I've seen in the industry, I saw it at Stratasys, I saw it at EOS, I saw it here at 3D Systems, is we tend to play portfolio roadmap like four-year-olds play soccer. Anybody ever watch a four-year-old play soccer? Anybody coaching a four-year-old play soccer?
What happens is they all run around, and they find the ball, and they all start kicking the ball at the same time. There's nobody else in the rest of the field. Generally speaking, what happens in our technology sector is everybody goes on a new project. You take all your engineering resources, and you think you're gonna. If I put all of my forces right there, right? I'm gonna be more successful. I'm gonna be faster. In reality, you're slower. You get in each other's way. What we have to do is stage our engineering and allow us to basically spread the field and to pass common resources at critical times in the development cycle.
Sometimes the critical time is solving a really hard problem in a lab, and sometimes the critical time is it's four weeks before launch and we're having an issue with one of our suppliers. What I have to do is specialize, right? You have specialists, and you have then some just industry player, broad players. If you look at that, I'm not going to read through all of that. I mean, I'll answer any questions you want. This is a general roadmap. I've got to be careful about going into too much detail. What we see is our SLA, we believe that that's an anchor. I've got a slide here in a little bit. It's going to be one of the case studies. I'm going to talk about SLA here in just a minute.
We've just relaunched our SLA. We're SLS 380. It was the SLS ProX 500 at one point, and then it's a 6100. This is an extension of that. It's just adding some more capabilities on thermal management. We're going to continue to look at performance refreshing on that. Our metal printing, our 500 is pretty costly because of ancillary equipment, so we're looking at doing a 500 Flex, and we're working on that right now to bring the cost down. Our Figure four , we've really found that to be really good for materials. A lot of our materials development has started there, and we're also taking it, what we learn on a Figure four, and then extending it to our SLA platform.
We also see an opportunity, as already was mentioned, in our bioprinting. Is, hey, can we take our Figure 4 technology and help with bioprinting? We may have some bioprinting variants come out in the future, as other people in labs look at doing that. Also, going larger, so we can have more industrial opportunities. Our MultiJet printer is a really good printer for us. But it's long in the tooth. We have abandoned that. All the little four-year-olds left that little soccer ball in the field, and they went off to the nice shiny soccer ball. That one's kind of been sitting around. We're deploying some of our resources to go do that. Then ultimately, we want to make it a more enhanced product.
We think that that's a long-term product, and we're working on that. The CJP is again, it's the Z Corp. It's the binder over powder. We have an opportunity to address the markets that that ExOne and Desktop Metal are addressing. Also voxeljet has a similar technology. We've really not capitalized on it. We acquired the company and have just kind of sat on it. I'm gonna be working with the teams to see if we can reboot that and really leverage our expertise in that area. Ironically, The Desktop Metal stuff, I was working on that, kind of the oven cycle of making metals. I was working that in the early 1990s through the university as well as my service bureau.
We always had some technical problems with that, and so we abandoned it, but seems like Desktop Metal and others have picked it back up. Extrusion technology, I've already addressed that. Before I leave that, I want to pause for a second before I talk about who the real bad guy is, and I'm going to talk about the bad guy here in a second. Any questions about our portfolio? Okay. Here's the enemy within. The problem with, again, our industry or engineers in general is, and I'm going to talk about more details in just a second, first, we independently develop a technology. If you look at the CJP platform or the SLS platform or the SLA platform, it looks regular.
I mean, it's what you would expect it to be. It's designed very well for its use. If you start to compare them as if they were a family, you can't see any family resemblance, right? No one looks like anyone else. What happens is, because we independently focus our engineering efforts on that one solution, which is good, we're focusing on a solution. The problem is we all focus on the individual solutions. Four-year-olds playing soccer. Everybody runs to this one, everybody runs to that one, but we don't always bring that core knowledge to it. One of the things that we see is we're not really using common subsystems. The second one is that monolithic development is typically very slow. We will typically say, "Hey, we're going to come out, and we're going to launch this new platform.
It's going to be three years and $100 bazillion, and this is what we're going to do, and we're going to focus all of our effort because we think it's really going to move the needle." In the meantime, everybody else who's generating the revenue for the company are having to support this really big project. It's really expensive, it's high risk, and it, well, it's just obviously not the best. These are the negatives. This is the enemy within. This is something that we have to fight. I'm gonna show you how we are doing that. Setting that up as the bad guy. First is we need to make sure that we build to deliver. I just brought this one up and you guys have seen these. This is a Figure 4.
I don't know, what is it? Is it FireWire? What do they call the little cable? Lightning cable, right? For iPhone, right, or USB 3. What's amazing about these cables is you can buy them for pennies, definitely less than $1. You know what's amazing about it? They transfer a lot of data, and they deliver power. You know how many 3D printing companies use these to deliver signal and power in their architecture? Nobody. Because we're making a custom cable, right? Because we think, you know, we think we know better than the rest of the world. What you end up doing is you have a lot of engineers developing a lot of things. One of the phrases that I picked up from one of my engineering friend, they always said COTS.
I thought COTS is like the thing you sleep on when you go to summer camp. He said, "No, it's commercial off-the-shelf." Well, the thing is, using commercial off-the-shelf allows you to focus your engineering resources. Instead of making special cables that's going to deliver data and power to your sensors, why not just use this cable and spend your time making better sensors, right? Or using those sensors and developing better controls. That's one thing, is we need to think about building to deliver. The other one is we need to manage to speed. Again, all three of these, I'm gonna do a deep dive on. Ultimately, as everyone's echoed since Jeff's presentation all the way through, is we have to focus on applications. What typically happens with an engineer when he starts solving the problem, he thinks he's the customer.
Most R&D people in the world believe that revenue comes into the budget so that they can do research. I need money. You can't cut my budget because I need to do research. In reality, we do research in order to deliver value to the shareholder, value to the company. Most engineering programs in the world, pretty much everywhere, have it backwards. Those that do well in this world have it the right way, is the innovation is here to launch new products and add new value. You're not here to just experiment in a room and do cool stuff. Happy engineering, as one of my colleagues used to say it. The first one is build to deliver. I already used this one as an example. Right now we would have, let's say, component A, let's say it's a cable.
We're gonna have SLA where number one is gonna have the cable to do the same thing as a Figure four, but it's gonna be different as the SLS, which also is doing the same thing, and it's four different cables doing all the same thing. What we have to do is think about, really, automotive is probably the best example, is let's use common architecture, let's use common interfaces. What we can do is by doing that, we can take one component that can spread across all of our platforms, and it actually makes operations easier. Instead of having 5,000 spare parts I have to sit on the shelf, maybe I only have 2,000 spare parts sitting on the shelf.
What we have to do is not only engineer the technology that's going to solve it, but we need to engineer the ecosystem around it, and ultimately, we need to engineer the mindset that thinks that way. What I have to do is start with a mindset and a process that our engineering staff is thinking about solving the problems in a real-world way, not just their way. That's where it comes into the next one, is how do we manage for speed? Here's. I don't know. Anybody read complex adaptive systems? Anybody familiar with that phrase? Here's two ways that engineers or technology companies solve uncertainty. When you're going into something new, how much is it gonna sell? How much is it gonna cost? What's the productivity? When you start on day one, you don't know.
You can go to one way or the other. You can go to chaos, or you can go to order. If I'm gonna go to order, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna build a really long requirements document, and we're gonna solve all the problems. We're gonna get them all out there, and we're gonna solve them today, and we're gonna fix the quality, and we're gonna fix the requirements on day one. Once we set that bar, if we don't achieve that bar, then what we'll do is it'll just take longer and longer and longer. Typical waterfall methods use, they go towards order, and so we're gonna order everything. In ordering everything, you're not adaptive. You're marching along, and you come across a river, and there wasn't a bridge there. Well, we didn't know that.
Well, if you would've just gone left, there's a bridge down the road on the left. Just aim towards that bridge. Well, we didn't know that, so we're building a bridge. What happens is waterfall ends up costing longer, and you miss the target. The other one is chaos, we just stay in the lab forever, right? We're just doing happy engineering. We're trying to solve all the problems before it ever gets to the product, and we're not able to connect those. What we try to do is agile. Agile goes around an application, and what we do is we generate with the young guys, the people that have grown up in today, they use the word hackathon. It used to be a made-up word, now it's probably in the dictionary.
A hackathon is just, can we get something to run? We're gonna stay up for 24 hours. Can we get it to work today, right? Do it once. I had a professor say this about thesis or dissertation or if it's art or if it's a book. The key to writing a good book is write a bad one first and edit it 1,000 times. We're just taking that same methodology and going into that, and what we're doing is we're aligning around agility. The last one is typically the engineers think they are the customer, and sometimes our salespeople think they are the engineers. Salespeople will tell the engineers the better way to design the product. Of course, it's already designed, it's already on the shelf. It doesn't help us today, maybe in 18 months.
What we have to do is we need to make sure that the applications is at the focus, but that we're integrating what we know in the field and through our healthcare and industrial segment that Reji and Menno just discussed, and how do we integrate that? You saw a lot of people talking about these customers. They're in my group. We've moved product management applications next to our engineering. Before, engineering thought its only job was to do new product introduction, right? We're just launching new products as far as sustaining products, you know, good luck with that. What we're doing is putting applications and product next to it so they can solve real-world problems in the right way. We have a feedback loop within our industrial segment and our healthcare segment.
Again, it's a little more iterative, it's a little more interactive, it's more collaborative, and we think we'll be able to do that. In doing that, these are some of the materials that we're also launching, and I'm gonna end on a case study. I'm still gonna finish. About 30 minutes, so. Here's just some material. I'm not gonna read all of this. I think we probably have 30 new materials that we will launch this year. One of the great things about having a broad portfolio, and this is industry-wide, is you really have an attachment rate of about 80% of materials on whichever that sold the native platform.
If Stratasys sells your platform, even if it's an open platform, the tendency is 80% of people just buy the materials from Stratasys because they're used to it. They're a customer or they're in the system or they trust it. One of the things that we're going to continue to do is look at ways that we can leverage our materials, not only internally but externally. We think we've got some really good materials for the world. We will continue to work on launching these materials. Part of that kind of agnostic bent is what if we have a really good material in Figure 4, can we get it to work on an SLA. That's some of our development effort, is to utilize materials across platforms.
Because if you qualified it on a small Figure 4, but you've got a big application, and it's a similar material, you have to requalify it. I think it makes it more efficient for our customers and for the applications ultimately. These are several of the materials. We've got one is a DuraForm PA material that we're excited about. It gives you some really good elongation. It's great for snap fits. It's not gonna break when you drop it. It's a little lower cost, and so we think that this is gonna be a very competitive product. We continue to work. Again, our strength has been stereolithography, and we will continue to focus on our strength, but we will also do other things as well.
The next thing, I'm just gonna talk a little bit. You've already seen the slides on the bottom left, the Explore all the way to Scale. You saw that, I think, on Reji's slide, potentially even on Menno's. What our application engineers do is they are the first user. They know the pains that our customers will go through, and they walk through them with or through that with our customers. First thing is the function. Really they helped to accelerate. If we have a customer who wants to do something, we work with them to accelerate. The other one is we're really looking at what we're doing, and again, some of the examples is be able to take what we've done and launch that outside.
We think we've got a very unique position because we have a very strong applications group. Honestly, the senior management that I brought in to work with me at 3D Systems has some names of people that are good practitioners. I myself can—I'm one of the few executives in the industry that can probably go out there and run a machine. It really makes a difference when we're focused on applications, is I know how to drive the car that we're making. Here's an example of how this all comes together. I'm gonna end on this with a conclusion. Here's our case study. If you're at the show, we're going to be showing you the new SLA 750. It was an internal project.
Even though we've been making SLA for a long time, they just took a new approach. If you look at the bottom, I love this picture. I asked them to include it. It's the junkiest picture. It's really fascinating. But if you look, I got the point over here. At the very top, it says legacy printer. It shows back there, you see a legacy printer. It also says, storage on top of printer. People are using our printers for storage. They're making 3D printed parts to put little lens wipes and attaching it to the monitor. They're like creating these little tags to say what the resin is, and they're actually putting that and taping it to it.
We've got a group that's UI/UX, and this is what they do. They actually go to a customer and say, "How are you using the machine?" When you know that that's the way they're using it, well, what if we integrated some of those solutions into our development instead of just doing it? This is something that our applications team really helps us do, is really get that customer input and feedback, identify key customers. We can put our engineers close to them. It's an eye chart. What it's able to do is we can actually map out the workflow and see where we can eliminate the waste. 'Cause ultimately for all of us in this room, the enemy in 3D printing is scalability.
Can we get the efficiency at scale? Can we make mass customization as cheap and as functional as traditional methods? That's what we are working towards. We're not gonna get there tomorrow, but we're gonna work at it a little bit at a time. If our design cycle is every three years, Stratasys or 3D Systems or whoever comes out with a new printer, we're never gonna get there in our lifetime. We've got to start thinking in 18 months, 12 months, six months. We have to iterate faster. This is something that we think is gonna help us do it. When we launch this, we're doing all of this. You can print it. We also have a way to transport it. We're working with key vendor partners to be able to clean it.
We've also developed our own curing oven that integrates both heat and UV wavelengths, and it's multiple wavelengths. You can actually tune the heating process and the curing process to get a lot of times what will happen is some of these resins, you cure them UV, and then you go and harden them in an oven and heat them. The problem is the heat transmits differently as the polymer changes and gets more thermally. There's cross-linking and all this stuff. If you can tune your thermal cycle and your curing cycle to coincide, you can actually get better mechanical properties, less distortion. The conclusion here, ultimately, number one, we've got the broadest technology. That's a good thing and a bad thing. The bad thing is it can lead to distraction.
Complex adaptive systems is we have to allow for our organization to be able to be flexible, to go and work on the systems that need to be worked at the right time to hit the market at the right way. The second one is that development process that I've already talked about, enhancing that development process. The last one is really going towards modular components. Don't have to reinvent the wheel. You know how many wheels we reinvent? We reinvent a lot. We make our own gears, we make our own stuff, and we could have bought it off the shelf. The thing is we'll use a 1-inch gear on this one and a 2-inch gear on that one, and we have to stock them all.
That's something that we're gonna do that hopefully improves our efficiency, as well as decreases our cost of goods, which can generate better margin. Faster product development cycles are gonna help all those. Anyway, that's it, and I'm gonna leave it to Wayne to do cleanup. Any questions while Wayne comes up? All right. I'm around this evening and this week if you wanna talk.
Thank you, David. I will say one thing. If you're looking for the protagonist in my story, it's profits. All right. It's been two years now since Jeff became CEO of 3D Systems, and the company's really undergone a remarkable transformation over that period. You know, he quickly changed the focus of the company to applications in high-value markets. We simplified and reorganized the company into two verticals, you know, healthcare and industrial. We restructured the cost base in order to better align the costs with the revenues, and then we divested the non-core businesses, and that resulted in about $420 million of cash proceeds last year in 2021. We used that money to strengthen our balance sheet, but we also used that money for acquisitions.
There were four acquisitions made in 2021 that used, I think, the total value was $240 million, of which $140 million was in cash and about $100 million of it came in stock. Anyway, it was really all those actions that took place in 2021 realized the benefits of it. For 2021, when you look at the results, our revenue was $544 million after adjusted for divestitures. That's a 32% growth over 2020, and even a 17% growth over the pre-pandemic 2019 levels. Our gross margin was 43%, and we had healthy EBITDA of $56 million after adjusting for divestitures, which was $66 million better than 2020.
If you take a look at our revenue profile, if you look at our two segments, healthcare and industrial, they're about the same in size. We have about 64% of our business in what we call recurring revenue. Recurring revenue is primarily driven by materials, services, and software. The non-recurring revenue is primarily printers, but printers actually drive recurring revenue. If you look at this model, basically for every $1 of printer sold, that will generate another $3 of recurring revenue over the life of that printer, okay? Some of that comes from software. Right now it's a small amount. We're hoping that amount gets bigger. We have services and we have materials. Materials is obviously the largest piece. You know, we have over 130 proprietary materials.
We will continue to innovate in that and hopefully drive that even further. Again, for every $1 of printer sold, there's another $3 of revenue that's generated over the life of that printer. This year will be a year of investment, and these investments should drive multiple growth opportunities. This drive, you know, we're expecting double-digit revenue growth over the midterm. First one's the obvious, the application focus in our high-value markets. We're gonna continue to maintain and enhance our broadest technology portfolio. Really three components of that is product refreshes on our technology, which provide the best balance of cost and functionality, and that's really what David just talked about. We'll continue to invest in materials to enable new and innovative applications.
Our software should lead the capabilities for the entire additive manufacturing industry, and that'll be another growth driver. We have the scale to support customer needs, from inception to fleet production, and I'll give you an example of that a little bit later. With respect to regenerative medicine, which you'll see tonight, you know, we've made some amazing developments in that, but it's still early days in it, and hopefully someday it'll be a game changer. When you look at application innovation, it really is the cornerstone or the fueling of our long-term growth. Think about it in two places. One is established markets such as orthopedics, jewelry, dental, and aerospace, but it's also in emerging markets where we have things like electric vehicles, connectors, and in oil and gas.
It is fundamental to our growth. In terms of scale, how we grow, you know, we talked about for every dollar of printers, we get more revenue, recurring revenue in materials, service, and software. The question is, can we also expand our customer base? If you look at the mix of our customers, we actually have a good mix between new customers and existing customers. Obviously, new customers contribute to revenue growth, but so do existing customers. We have a fleet that we service of printers that's roughly 20,000 printers. About 8,500 of those printers are just one at the customer. We also have over 1,500 customers that have 2-4 printers, and we have over 400 customers that have 5 or more printers. Those 400 customers average about 17 printers each.
If you look at customers with 3 or more printers, the number of customers over a five year have a five year CAGR of 11% in terms of the growth rate of those customers. We're continuing to expand with those customers as well. All right. Now we get to long-term financial targets. We've spent the time talking about what are sales growth drivers, and we think, and we believe that that should grow to about $1 billion in five years in 2027. From. If you take the midpoint of our 2022 guidance, that's a growth rate of about 10.7%. If you look at industry forecasts, when you look at the broad forecast for the additive manufacturing industry, it's about 20% growth rate.
If you look at the markets we service, I think Jeff actually showed it earlier, it's about a third of that. That third of the broadly defined market grows at about 12%. There's no reason to believe we're gonna grow less than that than the industry. If the industry forecasts are correct, we would believe that the $1 billion would be a little bit conservative. Also, to be clear, the $1 billion does not include any revenues from regenerative medicine 'cause it's just too early days to predict when it'll hit. We have gross margin we're targeting at 50%. As of today, that's so we're a ways from that number. In terms of how we get there, it'll come from printer standardization to reduce our cost of goods sold. David just talked about that.
It's the mix shift to higher margin software offerings that Ben discussed, and we should get some scale leverage from our supply chain as a result of that. We have R&D at about 10% of sales and SG&A at about 20% of sales. That implies about a 4.5% annual growth rate from our current spend for both those items. For SG&A, we do have a number of investments to make this year and next, but those will lead to productivity improvements. Between that and just the scale from higher volume, we're very comfortable that we can hit those targets. If you add all up, that would give you an operating profit of about 20%. We do have depreciation, which runs 3%-4% of revenue.
If you added the depreciation to the operating profit, it should be easy to get. You'd actually get EBITDA a little bit above 20%. We've kept it, our target at 20% just to be conservative. Actually, I'm gonna stop for 1 second. I just only have 1 more slide to wrap up. Does anybody have any specific questions on our targets? If you're raising your hand, I can't see you. Yeah, go ahead.
I was just wondering how we should think about the bridge to those targets. You know, if should it be gradual? Are there new products that should drive growth in years two, three? I'm just, you know, as we think of those targets.
Yeah. I'll put aside your view of the economy for the moment. There's no reason to think it shouldn't be relatively linear, but, you know, we're not gonna forecast it year by year. I think you'll see software probably picks up towards the later end.
If you've got questions for Wayne on the financial model, it is a good time to ask them. Let's pause for a second as Wayne just give you a microphone so the folks on the web can hear as well.
Oh, okay. Great.
Other questions for Wayne on the financial model?
Yeah.
Sure. Hi. Noelle Delp. If you had to look at those three drivers of margin improvement.
Right.
Is there a way you could kind of rank them or size, you know, how you think about the opportunity associated with each?
Yeah. I wish I was smart enough to do that. I think the short answer, it's a mix of all three. I don't think any. They're not in any particular order. We need to do all three. Okay. All right. Just to wrap up, you know, why invest in 3D Systems? You're not gonna believe this, but the first ones are 'cause of relentless application focus in high-value markets. We do have a very focused business. We have a strong balance sheet now. We announced two acquisitions in April. After those two acquisitions, our cash on hand is about $665 million. When you think about cash, there's three things you do with it. You invest in organic growth, you do M&A, or you return it to shareholders.
Today is about investing in organic growth, and our targets are based on the organic growth. We believe there's huge opportunities there, and plus, organic growth almost always has the best payback. With respect to M&A, we're in an industry with lots of opportunities, and so having some dry powder is actually a good thing. Then, we'll have a discussion on capital allocation at a later date with respect to the last item. We've demonstrated double-digit revenue growth, and we expect that to continue in order to hit our target of $1 billion, and we expect our margins to continue to expand through the scale or product mix, you know, to more software margins, more software and a refreshed product portfolio. With that, I'm gonna turn over to questions.
If I can ask my colleagues to come up, that would be great. I will ask the audience the first question. What city is the capital of orthopedics? Did I get that right? The orthopedic capital of the world. Where is the orthopedic capital of the world?
Indiana.
There you go. Warsaw, Indiana. All right.
Thanks, Wayne.
While everybody's kinda collecting their thoughts for a minute, the reason we really pound on this application focus, guys, is any business, in fact, I think any person in their individual life, you can only ever have one true priority. The mistake I think people make is saying, "I've got multiple priorities." Yes, you do have multiple priorities, but you only have one number one, right? Remember the old City Slickers movie, you know, I forgot the guy's name on the horse. He, like, he did this, you know, the young guy said, "Yeah." He said, "You gotta figure this out," whatever it is. What we are truly good at from the beginning of our company, when Chuck Hull founded this company, we were at our best when we're application-focused.
If we use that, we make our customers happy, and it drives our technology. Okay? It's what we're doing in regenerative medicine that you're gonna hear about tonight. It's what Reji and Menno ran through today. It's why we say it as a mantra over and over, application focus. Before we launch a new product, say, "What's the application? What are you trying to solve for?" Before we launch a new material. We launched more materials last year than this company did in the prior three. Okay? Every one of them had an application focus. Every one of them was directed toward a key customer solving an application. Now, pick it wisely, so that more customers share that need. That's great. You have one application you're trying to solve for, and it drives your growth.
It's a sustainable business model. Now, the problem a company generically would have with that is if you don't have a broad enough technology base to go after those applications, you're in trouble. We do. We've got metals and polymers. We've got a wide range of proprietary materials. We can also use off-the-shelf materials if we choose, and we have a market-leading set of software to go after them. We drive that based on the applications we're going after, and we count on that being applicable to a broad range. We're doing it today in semiconductors, okay? We picked one leading customer in semiconductor equipment manufacturing. We solved their problem. Today, Reji, I don't know how many components we have with our leading customer in semiconductor?
Well, what we've done now is we've moved from working with the one major OEM to now we work with the top five OEMs in the world based on that initial application development.
That's how the model works. We pick the number one guy that's really aggressive about embracing additive manufacturing. We solve his problem, and then we solve multiple problems for that same person because they like what they got. Then we apply it to everybody else in the industry. We own the IP for the printing, the materials, the software behind it. The customer gets the application, the process workflow. It works like magic. It's driving double-digit growth for us today. Because of our scale, we can do it on a sustainable basis, and I think we can do it better than anybody in this industry. That's the key to our success. The other thing I would tell you, in the summer of 2020, we had to pick what to work on, you know? We used that as the mantra, application focus.
We had a number of problems to fix, so there were three cultural attributes we adopted as our mantra. It's candor, focus, and speed among the executive team. It was COVID, so we spent a lot of time together, right? We basically isolated together, and we said, "Okay, let's be candid. What's not great about the company? What's screwed up? What do we need to go fix? Focus on that and go after it, hammer and tongs. Go after it with speed. You might miss a little bit, but you're gonna make significant progress." Candor, focus, and speed. If you look at our culture now, what we've added to that is employee engagement, diversity inclusion, things that make people want to work with their colleagues, things that make people wanna be attracted to the company. That's how we're attracting seasoned talent back to 3D Systems.
That's how we're attracting young people out of school. Last year, we had an intern class, summer intern class of 25 kids. We had 1,800 applications for 25 jobs, okay? In the midst of everybody crying about not having enough people to work for you, 1,800 applicants for 25 jobs. This year, we doubled the number of interns we have. We have 50 this year, okay? We have on average 100 applications for each internship 'cause it's really fun work. It's really cool, and it's really exciting, okay? Regenerative medicine approach, we're doing exactly the same thing but plowing new ground. Okay, I appreciate everybody coming. Questions for anyone. Jim Ricciuti. Bring a mic up, if you would, so the folks on the phone. Oh, yeah, bring a mic up for Jim, but Troy, you've got one. You wanna go?
Yeah, sure. This is Troy from Lake Street Capital Markets. A couple questions for David. I was gonna ask you about technologies that you're missing, and specifically high-speed sintering and powder bed metal, but you talked about both in your prepared remarks. Can you just go over both of them a little bit? For high-speed sintering, I'm guessing you guys haven't gotten a license from University of Sheffield. Are you doing something different than their technologies? Help us out with timeline for both and when we'll see those products.
I think to be clear, I use those as examples. I didn't say that those were specific. I just said we have the technology in-house if we wish to pursue that. I will say that our CJP, which is our Z Corp platform, typically uses a gypsum, and we use a colored ink on the gypsum. I will say this, we will be doing more than gypsum and colored ink on gypsum on that platform. Beyond that, I can't say specifics. What we've done in our technology group is we do discovery, and then we do development. In the history, typically what we would do is we would roll discovery into development to say, "Hey, we wanna go after high-speed sintering," or, "We wanna go after a metals binder with the metals," right?
That's discovery and development at the same time. Two elements of discovery is, one is, can we do it technologically? Two is there a market for the technology we would like to develop? We will be doing technology and market analysis over the next six months. If you looked at that's a little later. It's not today. It's a little bit later, and we will be looking into that. I think that's what I can probably safely say.
All right, a few more while I got the mic, if you don't mind. How about supportless metals as another capability that you guys talked about that I haven't launched yet officially, so.
We do have that. We've just branded it, and so we will start to beat that drum. All of our metals applications through our software allow that. I don't know about software integration so that what we've learned can then go to other suppliers. I don't know if you wanna speak, Guillaume.
The supportless printing is a generic capability in the 3DXpert software. It can be adopted by other vendors as well, but there is, of course, a lot of process development that comes with it, which is specifically where 3D Systems has invested extensively in the last couple of years to really make that work really well.
We have one follow-up for Ben, and then I'll hand off the mic here. With respect to machine learning in the machines, I guess to me, I think of FDM and DLP as something that you can scan while it's being built. If you think about SLS, DMLS, and SLA, the products are getting embedded, right, in the powders or the resins. Is it harder to do machine learning, AI capabilities in those technologies versus FDM and DLP?
Not necessarily. Machine learning can be applied on like various sensors. It could be image-based sensors, it could be temperature sensors or forces during the build process. No, it can also be applied to these other technologies.
Thanks, Troy. Jim.
Hi. Thanks for taking the question. Just, I'd like to pursue this recurring theme about application engineers and the group of eighty. How are these folks being organized? Is it you know, do you split them up industrial, healthcare? Are they you know, are you bringing you know, talent in based on that specific application, and how are you leveraging it?
Good. Very good question, Jim. I'll comment on that. David, maybe I could ask you to comment on that as well, and also the other guys, if you'd like. It is the heart and soul of our business. Application engineers bring the technologies together. They develop the process to solve an application. Very, very talented people. We've got a large number of them, I think the industry largest, over 80 dedicated process engineers that are working on applications every day. Many of them have broad enough skills that they can address both industrial and healthcare needs. We try to, you know, every company has to watch its cost as well. We try to spread the resources across market verticals if we can. They exist as one group. They're managed as one group. Inevitably, people take on specialization.
You end up migrating smaller numbers of people toward healthcare or a subset of healthcare like orthopedics and then also industrial. You might migrate toward the wafer manufacturing machinery applications or aerospace is a good example. You tend to have a few specialists, but we try to treat that as a group as broadly as we can to get the most out of the resource. It is the key element to our success as a business. David, do you wanna comment further on how we manage them? By the way, they're accounted for in our SG&A. They're accounted for as a sales cost, okay? They're not measured as a P&L. We took that away. They're a sales cost. That's how we account for them. Managerial-wise, though, they roll up to David under the engineering organization.
Yeah. There's a matrix. There's one is what. As you looked at one of my slides and one of Reji's slides, you saw about engagement all the way to scale. That's one way that we organize. The other one is discipline. Just like any organization, you have mechanical engineers or electrical engineers. Well, in applications, you've got aerospace. Aerospace could be investment casting, which is done in other places other than aerospace. What we do is we generally align them in those two matrices. I'll say the four regular ways from scale. The first one is what we would call customer engagement. We have our customer innovation center, which is where we work with customers on building benchmarks, working with them on engagement.
At a trade show like today or tomorrow, you'll see a lot of applications people that'll be at the trade show to answer questions, to be a resource for our sales and our marketing teams, as well as going to key customer visits. That's the first layer as far as applications focus. There's a group of people being managed by one of our application engineers in that way. The second group is what we would say is really enabling, where we then go in and maybe do consulting. You wanna buy our equipment, but you need some work on design for additive or whatever that is. We also have a more of a consultation version of that. That's the second one. The third one is one that's more kind of designed for additive, understanding that we have UI, UX.
You saw that embedded in that picture with all the Post-it notes. That group actually makes sure that we have applications embedded, application engineers embedded in each one of our technology teams, so that we can take the information we have and be able to scale it through launching better technology. It's better sensors or a better door or a cleaning thing or whatever it is that the customers need, we try to embed that. The last way is scale through production. Reji talked about that with one of the customers. It's very much embedded in what Menno does in medical, is where we can start with production, and then we can launch that production to our customers. We can stand side by side with them as they scale their production.
If it comes into someone like our medical, we'll actually do the production. It's those four areas that we focus our applications engineers, and then across that, the different functions. We will then hire, like a specialty. We'll say, "Okay, we need an aerospace application engineer in metals." We will hire people that do that, but then we plug them in that ecosystem. Hopefully, that made sense.
Yes. The last question for me is just I was wondering if we can go back to that serviceable addressable market, the addressable market. Obviously, we don't wanna go through every bucket. If you highlight in healthcare and industrial, where you think the strongest, most attractive growth rates are and where you think you've gained share or where you're really focusing on driving share that you can gain share over the next year.
It's really an intriguing question, Jim, because I would have told you a year ago, I would've guessed. You know, that pie chart split of our revenue today, it's been roughly 50/50 between industrial and healthcare. I would have told you healthcare will probably outpace it. In answer to Noelle's question, it that carries a higher gross margin generally. It would've been part of our gross margin lift. Healthcare is an incredible business. Today, I would tell you, I think the market for healthcare is probably smaller than industrial. I think industrial is bigger, and I think because of that, and its adoption rate is probably growing faster, but it's not grossly different. It's bigger and growing faster, and I think it will continue to do so. The benefits in healthcare are tremendous.
This mass customization in healthcare, because if you think about it today, and this is why we formed our medical advisory board, and Dr. Steve Klasko is chairing this. Hospitals are under tremendous pressure to improve patient outcomes and reduce costs, okay? In part, that means reduced infection rates, reduced recurrence of people coming back to the hospital. I'm sure a lot of you have known people that had knee replacements. The number one thing that fails on a knee replacement is infection. Somebody gets infection, has to come back in, sometimes have the whole thing replaced because they're infected. The use of 3D printing on a mass basis to customize orthopedic implants improves patient outcomes, gets them out of the hospital faster, reduces the recurring rate, and it increases the productivity of the surgical suite.
It was interesting when I lived in Minneapolis, my next-door neighbor was one of the leading orthopedic surgeons in Minneapolis. I would talk to him. He'd go in, he'd leave at 6:30 on days he worked. He would leave at 6:30 A.M. 'cause I teased him on many days he wasn't working. He'd leave at 6:30, get home, like, at 6:30 P.M. You know, I'd say, "How was your day?" He said, "I had 12 patients come through the surgery today." I said, "Wow." I said, "So what are you-- how are you measured? You know, how do you-- how does your boss, everyone, how do they measure you?" "Throughput.
Throughput and rate of recurrence." He said, "We have to have patients come through one time, leave the hospital well, and we have to have higher and higher throughput out of that." You don't think about productivity in hospitals much, but if we can customize an implant, just in orthopedics, customize the implant so the patient gets out faster and they have reduced rate of infection, just using that as one metric, and you have a higher throughput in the surgical suite, everybody wins, and the payoff is enormous for everyone. Reduced insurance rates, increased profits for hospitals, patients happier, and more of them surviving and recovering from surgery. I love healthcare. It's a hard business to get into. It's hard to be good at it.
Once you're in, as we are today, between FDA restrictions and approval requirements and process control and quality, huge barriers to entry. The benefits additive in healthcare are so high that I think the adoption rates are gonna grow and grow and grow. Now, is the overall market bigger than industrial? I don't believe so. I think industrial will really grow as aerospace, automotive. As the throughput and productivity because of some of the software improves, a lot of higher volume industrial applications will really take off. Now, will they carry the gross margin that a healthcare business does? No. The embedded cost, like the FDA process approval is not there. The embedded cost to deliver that product is more is attractive. We love both businesses. We love industrial. If you look at the last quarter, we grew 15% in industrial.
15%. Healthcare, we grew at a lower rate, but margins overall are better in healthcare for good reason. We love both businesses. I'm guessing net-net, our revenue splits will remain roughly the same over time. Is my guess. Because what it'll mean for us is in industrial, we'll pick our markets carefully. 'Cause I think, frankly, Jim, I think there are also markets where it's gonna be really hard to make money in. You know, like anything. I think some of the markets that value design differences less, they won't pay as much for additive. So those markets we'll avoid. That's why we're avoiding some of them today. If you look at aerospace, electric vehicles, some of the high-precision castings for rocketry, even jewelry, they really value additive, and it leads to a faster adoption rate and reasonable margins.
Long-winded answer to your question, but it's a very interesting one. I think all in all, both businesses for us are gonna grow really nicely. Yes. Yeah, right up front here, Monique.
Chip Skinner with the Royce Funds. Good presentation. Thank you. You mentioned software would be one of the drivers for higher margins in 2027. What % of revenues is software today, and what % do you think it will be in 2027?
Our recurring revenue percentages, and Wayne, I'll ask you to clarify in a minute and correct me if I'm wrong. Recurring revenues today are 2/3.
Yeah, 60/40%.
60%, roughly two-thirds. In that recurring revenue today is a software component, and there's a materials component for consumption. Materials will continue to grow, but the biggest growth area, I think, Chip, will be software. Software because customers want to run fleets of machines, and it would be very arrogant to think they only wanna run 3D Systems fleets of machines, okay? I'd love for them all to buy our stuff, but some of them aren't gonna. Actually, there's some really good competitors we have with new very interesting technologies. They're gonna wanna salt in some of their printers as well. So one of the beauties of Oqton and the reason we firewalled it off and we're keeping it separate is we want customers to adopt additive broadly, okay? Well, yes, it's good for us.
We'll have more recurring revenue from software. That's great. It will help everyone sell printers, sell recurring materials. Everybody else benefits as well. Customers will inevitably have big mixed fleets of printers. We'd like them to standardize on software to try to make it all more efficient, but that's how they're gonna get the economics of additive in the long term. If you looked at that bar chart, today, 2/3 of our revenue is aftermarket. Software is a smaller component of that, much smaller than materials. It will grow disproportionately quickly. Answering Noelle's question, the biggest lever we have in driving gross margin over the next five years is software sales. Software sales, by far and away. It's a recurring revenue model, cloud-based subscription model for software.
Can you hear me?
There you go.
I noticed, on one of the healthcare charts with the products that Oqton was on a number of those products already.
Yep.
you just acquired it in November. I was just curious, why is it already being used or used with, and how easy is it to integrate that software with your other products?
I'll start the answer, and Ben, you can actually answer it better. We looked at what we were hearing. Here's the history. We were hearing from our customers starting two years ago. As soon as COVID lifted enough for me to go see customers, we went to see them. I remember one specific trip, Reji and I went to an industrial customer, and he showed us the factory area that was empty. He said, "We're gonna put a fleet of printers in here. And in fairness, guys, some of them will be yours. We like some others, too.
We're gonna have them all in here." I said, "Well, what's your rate-limiting step putting them in?" He said, "Software." He said, "We have no good way today to put even at, even from the same supplier, multiple printers in here and post-print processing, robotics, all the things that go with modern manufacturing. If you go to traditional machining operations and things like this, good ones, you'll see machining, but you also see robotics that automatically move the parts and all of that." He said, "Today, I have to hire so many engineers to using Excel spreadsheets to schedule the parts through, to track them through, and there's no real automation in there." Everyone talks about intelligent machines themselves, and I'm proud of what we've done to make our machines really smart. What was missing was the ecosystem.
We said, "Well, okay, we've got a lot of software engineers. We could put them to work developing an ecosystem." We looked at that, and we costed it out. Or we could go out and try to partner or acquire something. We evaluated many, many options. This goes back a year and a half ago, and it was very clear Oqton had a huge leap on everybody else. They had the right vision, they had the right focus, that it brought along additive printing, but it had post-print processing, it had machining, it had robotics that could all plug into the same ecosystem through APIs. In that ecosystem, I'm putting this in my layman terms, but it's the ecosystem could plug into the factory system. SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, whatever they were running, it could plug in.
Then you could plug all the bits and bobs in the flow that you wanted, you could plug it right in, and it would all automatically sync up and run together, tracking the product, and through embedded AI, it could optimize the workflow through the process so that the customer had higher throughput. It wasn't all finished yet, but that's what had been demonstrated, and that's what the promise was. We said, "Look, what the best path became, let's acquire it. Let's firewall it off, keep them independent, so they can help everybody in the industry, and then finish what they started. Go out and finish all the pieces, and then let everybody sell it. Let every customer buy it and create that same kind of system like SAP and Oracle and the others. We won't displace those.
We'll be compatible with those." Ben, I'm sure I just said a litany of things that were stretched. What
Yeah. Like, integrating the 3D Systems printer. Before we were acquired, we already had several customers with 3D Systems equipment that we were working with, so we already had some integrations and actually production use. Once the acquisition closed, like in 3 months' time, we connected the whole fleet of different equipment that's available. We were able to do that very quickly. Largely because the platform was open and the software teams are integrated, we were able to do it really, really quickly.
Let me say one thing, and then I'll let you finish.
Yeah.
We made the strategic decision, 'cause it came up right away. Well, okay, we're gonna let everybody buy Oqton and sell Oqton and do all that. What about our core software for printing? We had already talked about relationships with other, you know, additive OEMs and things, and should we license it and all this stuff? We made a decision, look, let's just pack it all in and give people the option. They can buy and sell Oqton itself, which is the framework. Or they can use any piece of the software that we've developed ourselves, make it all cloud-based, make it all linked as options, and people can have a menu of items.
Maybe they have some other software they wanna use that they've developed, but only one piece of the puzzle, but they can get the rest of the piece from Oqton in total. We pushed it all into Oqton and say, now it's all available to the industry. Wayne?
Yeah, I just wanna make one clarification. We do not separately disclose our software sales. Software rolls up in industrial. It's part of the reason when Jeff says, "Hey, they're gonna end up roughly the same size," you know, no expectation of difference in the last five years, it's because the software is all in industrial.
Great question. Yes. Greg.
Yeah, thanks. Greg Palm, Craig-Hallum. Sticking on the applications focus, I think we're all familiar with, you know, how successful you've been in dental, specifically with a large aligner company. As you look ahead, what types of applications, use cases could be as big as that, you know, opportunity in aligners, and what are you most excited about near term?
Yeah, it's actually, I'm gonna ask Reji to comment on that because we talk a lot about it internally. I would tell you, it gets into some pretty sensitive discussions because we're bringing along. I would tell you, Greg, quite honestly, we're bringing along two or three customers which could be larger than our largest customer today in terms of the applications. It takes several years to demonstrate and implement and scale. If you look at how long that customer's been ramping up our technology, it's been a long time. It takes a while, but our challenge now is to bring other customers to that same level. We're engaged with those kind of customers that have the potential to consume that much of our technology.
Where it's at exactly, frankly speaking, and I hate to say it, is a bit sensitive because obviously, we don't want other people to go out and try to take the same approach. We're already hearing echoes back daily about application focus and all this other stuff. I don't wanna give it away that, you know, here's customer A, B, and C you should go take that approach with. Reji, anything else you wanna add?
I think one thing we can think about here is related to not the customer itself, because we can't speak about those, but what's enabling that. For example, as you think about material advancements, as you think about fire retardant material, it opens up a lot of opportunities for us. As you think about machine precision, it gives us a lot of areas that we can really extrapolate and grow fast. QuickCast, for example, even at broad stroke, it's like if you think about energy and things like that, you see out in the back room back there with respect to the drill bit that was done out of QuickCast.
As we build those capabilities, and that's what Dave is working on and what, well, Ben is working on, it opens up a lot of areas where we can really help customers grow fast. We have several of those that we're working on now. It's just to the point we said we kind of keeping quiet.
Greg, the other thing I would tell you, one of the greatest things about our company, one of the things that differentiates us is we develop a lot of our own value-added polymers. Inevitably, polymers off the shelf out there were generally developed for injection molding. That's and they all of their characteristics, the process parameters, all of that, injection molding and to get the right properties out the back end. Only now are we really ramping up materials that were specifically developed to use additive manufacturing for. The reason we're so focused, and we're proud of what we did last year in terms of materials launch, is those materials were developed for additive manufacturing. Customers can print parts, and it's not Reji mentioned one parameter.
Fire retardancy is really a difficult parameter because what you do to make something fire retardant generally screws up the mechanical properties. You got to balance it out with other additives that give you strength, toughness, the ability to hold shape and be stiff enough. It's a balance of those properties you have to strike. The reasons customer come to us is that we can not only provide a printer, we can provide a material and a process definition to give them the parts they want. That's what we're doing to cultivate higher volume customers that have the potential to be equivalent to our largest today.
Makes sense. My second unrelated question is, I think you mentioned that regenerative medicine is not a part of the 2027 targets.
Correct.
Is that a byproduct that you don't think that revenue is going to be material at that time?
No.
Because presumably there's a lot of costs that are going to hit the P&L, no matter what the revenue profile is.
Correct.
I'm just kind of curious to think.
Correct.
What was the thinking behind that?
I'll give you two answers to that question, and they're a little bit in opposition to one another. One of them is the timetable to get products approved by the FDA with 3D printed, you know, organs and soft tissues and things. It's a long process to get there. The real reason we're not showing 2027 revenue is that the steps to go through, the timing are still dependent very much on the day-to-day lab trials. If the trials go well, we start seeing revenue in that timeframe. If they stretch out, it could be longer than that. It's just too variable. Quite frankly, Greg, the numbers are so good on their own. I don't think we need to include regenerative medicine yet, honestly.
if you could actually see the projections for regenerative medicine, when it hits, it's eye-popping. When they come to market and are approved, it will dwarf the entire rest of the company, I will tell you. Now, what year it'll happen, I can't tell you. I don't know. So I never encourage people to invest today for regenerative medicine, but there will come a time where we say, "Now, we've gotten through enough trials. You guys should do it. You should invest because now we're entering clinical trials that are more predictable, and we have high confidence it'll be approved." That day will come, but it's not today. I love the numbers we can show you for our current business projections. I think it's an extremely healthy business.
A billion-dollar company doing 50% gross margins and 20% EBITDA margins, I'd personally invest in all day long. Yeah. Other questions? Yes.
I'm Hugh. I'm a private investor. The company has $670 million of cash, but it has $470 million of convertible debt.
Correct.
Unless the stock goes to, I think 35 is the number, that debt's gonna come due, I believe, in 2025. My question is, are you willing to spend into a net debt position?
Oh, for the right return on it in the right time frame, Hugh, yes. I mean, we put that cash on the balance sheet for a reason, because we believe there are opportunities to invest, okay? Now, we happen to go to market at a great time. We have zero interest coupon debt until that time frame. But then we owe it back, right? So we have a window of opportunity here to invest that money with an idea of generating enough EBITDA to either refinance or pay the loan back. Alternatively, we can leave the cash on the balance sheet and pay it back then. So we can afford to be very opportunistic about investing our capital right now. If there's one silver lining to the markets coming down, assets are getting less expensive.
You look at the returns, if you believe, you know, if you pick them right, you look at the returns, they should be favorable at some point here in a soft market. We'll see. We'll see what we actually do with the cash.
Hugh, we get another year. It's actually, I believe it's 2026.
2026. Yeah. I am glad we went to market when we did. 0%'s a good number.
Hi, Jeff.
Yes, Brian.
Brian Drab with William Blair & Company. You put up a great slide about the production capabilities. I was wondering if you could just give us another level of granularity there. You talked about 1 million, over 1 million parts per day. I've got a lot of questions around this, so I'm trying to figure out one that you'll actually answer.
Keep thinking, Brian.
Well, I've been thinking about it for 10 minutes. Here I go. Here's how I'm gonna try it. I think that dental is the number one application accounting for those-
Sure.
Production parts. Can you give us any sense for what percentage of the million-plus does dental account for? And if the answer to that is no, can you at least say, is it over 80%, over 70%? And then the follow-up piece to this is can you rank order the applications, maybe the top three or four applications that account for the million, dental being number one, then two, three, four.
The only part of that question that I can answer, I could hide my sensitivity. Actually, I don't know the answer to the next one. I can't Pareto out the. I can tell you dental's clearly, and it's not rocket science. Dental is clearly the dominant factor there. We love that business. You know, yes, we have a very large customer, but we have. I wanna believe immodestly that we've helped them tremendously grow their business. We continue to do it. We love these guys. We direct R&D toward them, making them increasingly successful. We love the growth. We also learn a ton about fleet behavior, machine to machine variability, fleet behavior. How do you manage hundreds of printers in production 24/7? How do you service them? How do you keep them running?
Machine to machine variation in a large fleet is a huge deal. As we try to develop other customers to rival them, machine to machine variation is actually a huge issue, making sure that you can reproducibly print things over and over again out of multiple machines. I'm trying to talk long enough to not actually have to answer your question. No, dental is number one. I can't tell you what percentage it is. It's clearly a significant part of that number, and we're very proud of that. There are several other applications in there that contribute meaningfully to that number. I wish I had them Paretoed out because I'd be happy to tell you, but I don't.
I have to push back slightly. Even if you don't rank order them, can you just say what the other, you know, few top applications that come to mind after dental are? I'm just trying to think of industry.
No. I understand.
Put you in a tight spot. I just really want to picture what industries are your biggest.
Another example of that is jewelry. For example, the number of pieces of jewelry that is made on them. We've got hundreds and hundreds of those machines all over the world, producing pieces for that every day. That's an example of one of the other pieces in there.
Broader than jewelry is we have at least two technologies that can be used in the investment casting business, right? Our QuickCast that you can see out there, as well as our wax capability on our MultiJet printer, that lends itself to high quantities because each one of those will be invested to make a part. That's a very good recurring model, is to be in investment casting.
Just as one more quick one, too. In the video that you showed, that part for the semiconductor manufacturer, was that an end-use part, or was that a development project?
That part, I don't know if that picture of the part that's out there right now is probably not the part for obvious IP reasons. They're not gonna let us take around the part that they're using. That part is in those machines that will be going. Those parts being done for semi capital equipment right now are end-use parts going in those machines. Those out on the back table are examples of those parts, right? They're not gonna let us take the actual piece. Yes, so semiconductor parts are going in end use. It's not volumes of hundreds and thousands a day, as you can imagine, for the basic, but the value of those parts are significant. You know, obviously, we do a lot in motorsports, significant volumes all the time.
I mean, you're basically making a new race car every week. For almost every team and a lot of those things. We're doing a lot of that every day. There's a lot of pieces. Again, within space, within passive RF, we make a lot of those pieces as well. There's a lot of things that are happening. What you know, back to that 2 by 2 that we showed, sometimes it's low value or high volume, sometimes it's high value or high volume. Then sometimes, like in semiconductor fabrication, it's high value for that part and low volume. Those parts are obviously very expensive, but they are end-use parts.
That part that was shown in the video, Brian, to Reji's point, I don't believe it was for IP reasons, it was probably the actual part, but it was very representative. If I remember correctly, Reji, that part that they showed with the tubes, the kinda twisted tubes that went through, it was made up actually before they additively printed it, of 15 parts that were actually mechanically joined together to make that assembly. You can make them a better geometry and do it in one shot with additive, which is a really cool application of that.
I guess I didn't want to get hung up on the specific part in the video, but I just wanna make clear, the technology is good enough, the DMLS, to make parts that are going into semiconductor production. That's super impressive.
Yeah. In that instance, those are things that the tier one supplier makes. Multiple parts.
Multiple parts in production today, Brian. In fact, they're becoming a significant customer of ours. You know, they're buying machinery to make parts in production. Other questions? It's a little hard to see in the light, but that's. Forgive me if I miss a name.
Hi. It's Paul Chung, JP Morgan.
Hey, Paul.
Hey. Just on the recurring theme, you know, kinda given your broad materials portfolio, you know, how much of that is kinda unattached to your own printers, and is that an opportunity? I think you also mentioned, you know, you could even look beyond additive to other industries with your materials portfolio.
To be clear, when we develop a material, we develop it. I'll come back to this. Strong application focus requires a certain, for example, it requires a certain polymer performance. We develop that material, we develop the process on one of our printers to make the parts, and we bring them together for the solution. Now, to the point that I think David made, that material could be used by other machine, other hardware manufacturers. Their process parameters might be different, but it could be very equally used on other folks' machines, and we're exploring those kind of relationships today. Because obviously, we make the R&D investment, we wanna get the biggest bang for doing so. Increasingly, we're looking at that business model, where we would make some of our materials or maybe all of our materials available to other folks.
You know, on the printer side, are you also kind of exploring maybe a subscription-type model? Is that something your customers are asking for?
Not so much. Quite honestly, they're really not asking, I don't believe. Guys, correct me if I'm wrong. Really not asking for that.
Yeah, we've had some exploration of that. For the most part, it depends on the structure of the deal. You know, there's CapEx or OpEx, depending on what they're looking for. We've looked at it, and we're investigating it right now. The demand from a commercial side is not significant. There are mechanisms by which we could do that, and we are exploring those for if the time arises that we see more of a demand from that from a customer. At this point, we're not seeing it, but it is available.
Just real quick with that, and I'll use Tesla as an example since they're not in our industry. There's a lot of embedded features in an intelligent vehicle or intelligent machine that can be subscription, where you may actually own the equipment, but you wanna have certain features available. Partnering with Oqton and our development teams, we believe that we will be able to allow more of a subscription model to features that allow for more intelligent systems and more intelligent software that will allow us to scale our business while positively impacting, right? What we're trying to do is add value to the customer, and so those are things that we will be exploring as we develop towards this $1 billion goal. Yeah, Troy.
Hey, how about a couple questions for Menno? How far are we from directly printing the aligner versus printing a mold and then vacuum casting the aligner?
I don't know that it's my place to put specific timelines on it. We, as well as others, are working on that technology.
What about materials?
It's a combination of both the materials and delivery vehicle, and not just for the technical feasibility, but also for the economic viability as well.
Okay. What materials are you guys using for the radiation oncology?
It's one of our off-the-shelf MJP materials that does have the biocompatibility that we need for it.
Perfect. A couple more. You didn't call out prosthetics as a vertical that you guys go after, and I always thought that that was a very big vertical and very custom to individuals. Is that big for you guys? Is that an opportunity or?
It's an opportunity, and we participate to it, I would say, less so than some of the other areas. Where we excel is in areas that are regulated quite heavily and where our knowledge in that space, together with our quality management systems in our facilities, differentiates us from others. We have, I would say, a greater level of differentiation than in prosthetics.
All right. Last one for you, I hear a lot about point of care in the healthcare industry.
Yep.
Is that an opportunity? I'd imagine for systems and materials, but maybe a risk to the Littleton operations.
It's a great opportunity for the business. I wouldn't look at it as a risk to the traditional business. It's really something that's quite complementary. The example that I gave earlier is, if you think about both the planning work that needs to be done as well as the manufacturing works, there's a great opportunity for us to share that work between the respective facilities. In general, what Littleton and our European factories are meant to do is to really prove out the ability that we can manufacture at scale. We don't have ambitions to build the world's largest factory and then start supplying directly to others. It's part of an ecosystem that proves it and provides flex capacity when it's needed. Other than that, we're quite content, operating, let's say, at a more modest scale.
You know, in terms of business model, Troy, as we look ahead, though, as regenerative medicine becomes a real business, we have a deep partnership with United Therapeutics for human organs, okay? In that case, we're co-developing it with them, where we focus on the printing technology and the use of specific materials to print the scaffolding. When that's proven successful, they envision to be the manufacturer of lungs, per se. Other organs, we're still in discussions about who's actually gonna make it. But I can tell you, when it comes to non-organ applications, and we think there will be many of them, there's a high likelihood that we'll actually move from developing the application to actually making the component itself for the body and working with a channel partner to get that to market.
Because there's just so much IP tied up in the manufacture of those that I believe our business model will change for regenerative a bit, and we'll end up actually developing micro factories, if you will, for biologics. I think it'll be an exciting opportunity. A little more capital intensive upfront, but the return on capital should be excellent in that type of business. Things to come, and we can't put a timeframe on that yet, but I suspect our business model, based on what we've learned in Littleton, will change a bit for biologics. Okay, more questions?
Hi, this is John from Bank of America.
Hi.
Hey, just two quick questions, if I may. Just looking at the 2027 financial guidance of 20% EBITDA, just wondering how should we think about the cash flow trajectory relative to EBITDA?
Excellent question. I think generally speaking, if you think about CapEx, our mantra is it runs about 4% of revenues, so that's probably the only data point I can give you that will help you.
Yeah. You know, we're spending a bit more capital right now because we're still trying to consolidate footprints and things. We were a highly geographically fragmented company. We're trying to consolidate some sites and putting in a little brick and mortar here and there to accommodate that. By and large, though, because we assemble and sell the equipment itself and things, we're not highly capital intensive. When you look at 20% EBITDA margins, a lot of that will turn into free cash in at the end of the day.
Okay. Thank you. A quick follow-up, if I may. You've provided a slide regarding the printer lifetime revenue, going from 1x printer to 4x total. Just curious, how did that fare historically? You know, how has the transition or the changes have been to get to that 4x?
Well, that is an actual snapshot today of that profile, okay, on average. Now, clearly, it varies by metals and polymers. It varies by specific market application. If you add it all up, average it all out, that's the view today. I expect it's been that way for some number of years. We just don't have the data to tell you how much, quite frankly. I'm sorry, John, we can't go back in time very much.
Well-
In my experience as an owner of a machine and what I spend on, right, which is my expense is someone else's gain, right? It's pretty consistent. These machines last typically more than a decade. Most of the time the software is embedded. When you buy a machine, the software comes with it and is basically a perpetual license, so there's not a lot of recurring revenue historically in this industry. I'm not talking specifically, but historically in the industry. Typically, service cost is a percentage of the machine per year, and it's a fairly small percentage when you think about it over time. That materials cost, in my costs, and just generally speaking as a service bureau, 20%-30% of the cost of the part that I sell to you would be materials.
That's all the time, right? You can see the materials is gonna be a large part of the recurring revenue for whomever is selling that material. That model is pretty consistent for the industry.
Again, if you look, that was a snapshot of today, an average for our company today. If you project forward, what will change on that chart is the percentage of revenue from software, the recurring revenue from software. As we sell more software and we move to a recurring revenue model, a subscription-based model, that percentage will grow over time. That's part of our gross margin game plan.
I will say, again, generically for the industry, as we try to drive more productivity for the machine, the machine will then be able to consume more materials, which will then put downward pressure on materials costs, right? 'Cause it'll be then the one that everybody wants to focus on. Those become limiting factors, as you do that. Again, the more productive you get, the cost of the machine generally goes down because that cost, you know, is spread out.
Okay. Time for one or two more, if you wish. Any other questions? Okay. Let's talk about this evening. Here's a teaser for tonight. Tonight, for those online, I'm sorry, you won't get the benefit of the food, nor the presentation, right? We're not webcasting this evening, correct?
No.
A reward for those who showed up in person here. I think it will be a marvelous dinner. It'll be a fascinating presentation. We've talked for some time. Here's a factoid that I just found fascinating. We've talked for some time about printing a human lung, okay? Just the concept of that blew my mind for my first year at 3D Systems. Once you spend time with it and break it down into its elements, you understand it, but it's still staggering. Here's a staggering factoid. If you look at the vasculature, okay, the blood vessels and the airways that go into a lung, and the lung's the size of a, basically a milk carton, right? There's 4,000 km of vasculature in a lung on average. You say, "Okay. 4,000 km.
I have no concept what 4,000 km is. Number 1, I'm in America, we don't talk about kilometers. That's equivalent. If you started on Venice Beach and you drive to Coney Island, that's about 4,000 km in your car. 4,000 km, Venice Beach, California, to Coney Island, New York. Nathan's Hot Dog, there you go as a reward. You get there. 4,000 km. Now, get this, though. Okay, you can imagine, "Okay, I can drive 4,000 km. A few tanks of gas, $100,000 for gasoline, I can drive. I can drive to Coney Island." Get this. Along the way, the car can't depart from its path by more than the diameter of a human hair. A human hair. You drive 4,000 km, Venice Beach to Coney Island, and you have to stay in your lane.
You can't move more than the diameter of a human hair all the way. That's printing the vasculature of a lung. That's the technical challenge. That's why five years ago, when Chuck Hull was approached to do this, said, "That's impossible." Because bear in mind, the materials you're printing from are the consistency of Jell-O before it's formed, okay? It's like the thick liquid. So you're printing with something like that, and you have to print 4,000 kilometers of passages with the variation less than a human hair. That's the challenge. Four years ago, we took it on, and we progressed that technology remarkably today. What we're gonna talk about tonight is some of the basics, the building blocks to that goal, but even it's an incredible goal that I'm sure we'll attain someday, okay?
What's exciting is the technology that comes along with that can be applied to the rest of the human body in incredible ways in a much shorter timeframe. We have a marvelous relationship with United Therapeutics. I have a tremendous amount of respect for their CEO and their dedication. Speed. They're focused on success in this effort, and I love them for it. It's great. It'll bring incredible benefits to humanity. Beyond that, we will expand to other organs, but beyond that, we've been funding ourselves, applications in the rest of the human body. For the first time tonight, you're gonna hear about one of the leading applications that we're going after in the rest of the body. The technical challenges are much smaller.
The reason I tell you the Venice to Coney Island story is that the brass ring. That's the gold standard. Silver and bronze are pretty good, okay? There are lower requirements for the rest of the human body in certain applications, much easier to attain, much faster and very, very beneficial to the people that you attain it for and a very good business. I'm tremendously excited about the progress we're making. There's still a lot of stuff we can't talk about, but you're gonna hear more and more of it. The fact that we announced this morning the formation of a medical advisory board it's starting to become real.
We need guidance and help from folks that have managed the process from the laboratory through certification and implementation commercially, because the number of applications we have are gonna grow over time now. I'm excited about it. Tonight, all that was meant to say, please come to dinner. You're gonna hear about some exciting stuff. I do wanna calibrate you. We're not gonna be very specific on timelines. We're not gonna be very specific on economics. Bear in mind, the fruits of this effort, when they happen, I believe will dwarf the rest of the company. We're excited about it, clearly. We look forward to seeing you. We're done a bit early. What time are we starting the drinks? Not that that crosses anybody's mind, but what time? Melanie, what time are we starting drinks?
4:00 P.M.
4:00 P.M.
Online.
Yeah. Those online, that's some other time zone. 4:00 P.M., we'll have soft drinks and otherwise available out here in the outer area. Then dinner's right through that wall right there. In the next room will be dinner and the presentation this evening.
Kurt, don't forget the parts out there.
Oh, yeah, we have a table full of parts out there. Now that you've heard the presentations, look at the parts out there, metal and polymer both. I think you'll find them fascinating. Needless to say, I think it's a great industry, okay? I think there'll be winners and losers, undoubtedly. I think we're very well-positioned to be a winner in this industry for reasons that we've enumerated. I appreciate you guys making time to come and see us this afternoon. We will do this on some regular basis. I would like to get you guys to some of our sites like Littleton, Colorado, which is where our healthcare center is at. It's beautiful. I'd like to get you to some customer sites as well, if you have an interest.
We'll occasionally do it in conjunction with a trade show as well. Thank you all. For those that follow the company, thanks for your effort. I know you're very busy people. Thanks for your attention and your effort, and we will look forward to seeing you this evening, okay. Thanks very much.