Technology Landscape of 3D-Printing: Pioneer Companies

3D printing technology is a way of creating physical objects from digital models by depositing layers of material. 3D printing has many applications and benefits, such as prototyping, customization, innovation, and sustainability. Therefore, we examined 13268 related patents from various companies from 2000 to 2023.

Most of the patents in this field have been published since 2012. The largest number of patents have been registered in China and the trend has been that the registration of patents in the jurisdiction of China has continued until 2018, and since 2018 it has faced a significant decreasing trend. This is while patent registration in the United States has had a relatively steady growth trend since 2012, and since 2020, the number of patents registered in the USPTO has surpassed that of China, which indicates possible changes in market demand. Also, the amount of patent registration in Europe is increasing with a relatively constant growth rate. Although China still has the highest number of patents registered in this field, it seems that the tendency of companies to register patents in USA and Europe is growing faster.

Despite the high volume of patent registrations in China, the leading companies applying for patents are all large US and multinational companies. With more than 400 patent applications, Hewlett-Packard is far ahead of other competitors. After that, there are Signify Holding, Xerox, XYZPrinting and Knipo.

Meanwhile, the significant increase of patents registered by Hewlett-Packard company, especially between the years 2019 and 2021, is significant compared to other competitors. While during the years of the Covid-19 pandemic, most of the leading companies did not have much growth in patent applications, Hewlett-Packard Company has set new records in this field, which indicates the high investment of this company in the field of 3D printers and probably in In the future, we will face a wide range of products related to 3D printing technology by HP.

The highest number of citations is related to the patents of Velo Trade Company with the number of 3017 citations. After that, the patents of MARKFORGED, Autodesk and Harvard College. The high number of citations of Velo Trade Company indicates the high value of the registered patents of this company. Considering that most of the patents in this field have been registered since 2012, this high number of citations to active patents shows that this group is the leader in the advanced technologies of this field.

According to the IPC classification, patents can be classified in 4 levels: class, subclass, main group and subgroup, each of the components of this technology tree represents a range of technologies and their applications. The chart below shows the top Main-Groups in terms of the number of patent applications in that category.

As it is shown, “Additive manufacturing, i.E. Manufacturing of three-dimensional [3d] objects by additive deposition, additive agglomeration or additive layering, e.G. By 3d printing, stereolithography or selective laser sintering “with code B29C64 is at the top, then there is the area of Apparatus for additive manufacturing. Processes of additive manufacturing, Products made by additive manufacturing , and Data acquisition or data processing for additive manufacturing are among the Main-Groups with the highest number of registered patents.

To analyze the content of these patents, we have used the topic modeling method. The most important topics mentioned in the patents of this field are presented in the figure below. Topic modeling is a way of finding the main themes or topics in a collection of the patents. It is a type of unsupervised machine learning, which means it does not need any human input or labels to group the words together. The counted themes represent the thematic focus of patents on areas such as 3D printing for use in the body and bones, dentistry and implants, surfaces, containers, and materials and inks used.

In addition, understanding the cooperation network of leading companies in the field of patent application can indicate the policies of different companies in the field of technology development and innovation. Also, the precise understanding of these networks can help to find new partners in the path of technology development. In the figure below, the collaborations of the 10 main patent applicant companies are presented.

In STIMAnalytics, we analyze the technology trend, main players’ activities, market coverage and patenting strategies in the field of 3D-Printing by using AI-Powered service of STIMAnalytics. You can find the full report on https://stimanalytics.net/portfolio-item/patent-analysis-3d-printing/