Skyrocketing Bambu Lab leaves Creality in a sea of printers

Canada-based 3D printing news portal Fabbaloo has a unique understanding of the desktop 3D printing market. In the latest series of articles, Fabbaloo’s founder Kerry Stevenson looks at the rapidly changing dynamics in the desktop 3D printing market, with new entry Bambu Lab rapidly taking over market share and leaving competitors such as Creality and others struggling to compete, often weighed down by a large offer of sometimes outdated machines. But let’s go in order.

A few days ago Fabbaloo reported about Prusa’s battle with Bambu Lab, with the company’s founder Joseph Prusa indirectly accusing the company of improper use of open-source licenses. Now Kerry looks at what other desktop 3D printer manufacturers should do to keep up with Bambu Lab. The article points out how the company appeared on the scene a bit over a year or so ago, with the introduction of a revolutionary 3D printer that took things to the next level.

The main feature, at least as seen from a first glance, would be that their equipment prints far, far faster than other equipment at the time. This quickly generated a series of frantic upgrades from competitors who suddenly found their equipment running as much as 5X slower than Bambu Lab’s. In the past year, many desktop 3D printer manufacturers have released faster equipment. “Sometimes ‘faster’ didn’t mean ‘as fast as Bambu Lab’, but instead meant ‘faster than our previous model’. It is very challenging to quickly crank out a new model that is 5X faster,” Kerry argues.

But some manufacturers did so. Does this mean they have caught up to Bambu Lab? Probably not. In the full article, Fabbaloo tries to answer that question in more detail.

On the other hand, especially after the release of Bambu Lab’s new A1 low-cost system, some of the manufacturers that may risk losing the most market share to the new entry company are leading low-cost Chinese manufacturers such as Creality. In another interesting article, Fabbaloo looks at how the company’s huge lineup of 3D printers may slow it down.

“The company – Kerry argues – has released so many models that it’s hard to keep track of them. Creality has a habit of releasing new machines every few months, leading to quite a long equipment list. How long, exactly, is that list? Honestly, I don’t know, and it’s nearly impossible to figure that out unless one digs through the secret paperwork at Creality HQ.

In the full article, Kerry looks at the various types of 3D printers (well over 50 different models) offered by Creality to better understand the company’s strategy, especially with continuing to support older models and applying small incremental changes to new models. However, he also concludes that Creality could get the job done – probably even more efficiently – with a much smaller product catalog and that so many models do take up room in the mind of its client base.

Such an extensive product offer seems to show that Creality is not as dynamic and quick to adapt to a rapidly changing desktop 3D printing industry as newer companies.

The really big question is: how are sales being affected by these rapidly changing market dynamics? That’s something we are working on answering (together with every possible question you may have on the polymer AM market) in the next edition of our Polymer AM Market report, out in early 2024 [here is the 2021/22 edition].