Multibillion 3D printer maker may open Irish operation

Avi Reichental, the chief executive of 3D Systems a $5 billion maker of three-dimensional printers, has said his company is considering opening an Irish operation. Mr Reichental said he had been recently contacted by the IDA about investing in Ireland as part of his businesses expansion into Europe.

“We are very open to expanding in Europe as half our revenue comes from outside of the US,” he said. “We are very much a global company.”

“Ireland and Dublin in particular is attractive in terms of creating activities like common shared services and effective distribution and support.

"Ireland makes it very easy to run consolidated operations and most importantly it has a lot of really smart industrious entrepreneurial people. That is why you have a lot of technology companies in Dublin already," Mr Reichental told The Irish Times at the Exponential Finance conference in New York, organised by Singularity University.

‘Disruption’

Mr Reichental, whose company was the first to commercialise 3D Printing in 1989, predicted that greater access to 3D printing would lead to “disruption” of both established industries and firms, creating new opportunities for Irish business.

“Ireland can establish itself as a manufacturing economy, a digital fabrication economy and a digitally literal economy in a world which inevitably going to return to localised manufacturing,” he said.

Mr Reichental predicted 3D printing would allow small firms or industries create “self sustaining, hyper local manufacturing economies.”

Return to roots

He said it greatly reduced the cost of developing as well as making new products making economies of scale less important. “3D Printing allows you for the first time in a few hundred years to return to our roots and to recover some of the very artisan and craftsman skills which have atrophied.”

“That is huge, especially for smaller countries [like Ireland] which are trying to redefine and differentiate themselves in acquiring new skills and economic models that are sustainable,” he said.

Mr Reichental said he believed that not only would Ireland’s medical device industry use 3D to develop new products but surgeons would use it to practice with before performing operations.