In the Industrial/Professional 3D Printer segment - which includes printers from $10K to over $1M - the market saw revenues shift to the ultra-high end as 3D metal printers continued to gain traction.  Metal has seen a surge in recent years as printers capable of printing in these materials make headway in the manufacturing sector, moving away from just prototyping, which is where many plastics-based printers are still used.

Metal 3D printers typically have very high prices ($1M+) and are quite large, often taking up a sizable amount of a factory floor, and thus do not lend themselves to being sold or distributed via indirect channels. On the back of this, the Industrial/Professional market saw 40% of the revenues generated from printer shipments in 2016 flow directly from vendor to end customer, up from 31% a year ago.

The major indirect channel for sale of industrial/professional printers is through single-tier specialized distributors dedicated either to 3D printing and CAD or to a specific given vertical market such as jewelry or machining. Sales through these accounted for 57% of global revenues, down from 65% a year ago.

Going forward the industry is set to change once again marked by the continued refocus/defocus on the desktop segment by industry leaders Stratasys and 3D Systems, the continued rise of XYZprinting, the emergence of new vendors like Monoprice and shipments against successful Crowdsourced efforts all impacting the global go-to-market channel distribution landscape.  On the industrial/professional side, the channel landscape will be affected by the entrance of channel-centric HP, the continued progression of EOS, the emergence of GE's new company GE Additive and the advancement of metal 3D printing.

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