Sorry for being chatty today but the more I read about the...

Sorry for being chatty today but the more I read about the background of those companies and the more the story forms in my head and the more excited Im becoming about this announcement.

From what Im reading the maritime industry is the perfect use case for additive manufacturing where companies have to balance inventory cost vs small batch production lead times for their spare parts. 3D printing offers basically a catalog that can be quickly produced, on demand and anywhere instead of shipping the parts from a producer to the ship location or build a company inventory and ship from a physical warehouses location.

From https://safety4sea.com/3d-printing-the-marine-industry/


According to this article (https://www.3dprintingmedia.network/category/industry/marine/) Additive Manufacturing had a slow adoption in the maritime industry because of its limitations to produce larger parts addressing the large ship, transport and naval segment. Powder based modules from competition seems indeed targeting the production of smaller parts while the WAM Arcemy module seems to be the perfect candidate for those larger pieces

Now back to this Purchase Order, it seems that Wilhelmsen mission is to provide an on demand spare part service to the key players in the industry and they have been awarded funding to start a program out of Singapore (and in collaboration with the port authorities) and onboarded 6 early adopters and heavy players in the sector as clientm the likes Carnival, Thome Ship Management, etc

From https://www.wilhelmsen.com/maritime-innovation-lab/3d-printing-from-shipping-parts-to-sending-files/




Wilhelmsen is collaborating with Ivaldi (they own 15% of the company), an Additive Manufacturing bureau providing screening, product qualification and certification services that collaborate with various 3D printing companies (https://www.3dprintingmedia.network/tytus3d-participates-in-joint-industry-project-jip-on-maritime-3d-printing-in-singapore/ ) to provide the required on-demand spare parts for that list of clients.

The Lloyd Register certification seems like a prerequisite to be part of the program and Singapore on top of being a strong maritime hub is positioning itself as a leader in AM technologies

From Lloys Register website https://www.lr.org/en-au/latest-news/3d-metalforge-additive-manufacturing-singapore/


To conclude (my apologies for the length of this post), I realised through those readings that the opening of AML3D hub in Singapore was in fact targeting the maritime sector with the ambition to be part of Wilhelmsen on demand spare part initiative and that this first purchase order is not a small deal but a key objective and milestone for AML3D effectively signing their involvement in a large scale initiative supported by the key players in the industry with concrete demand to switch to virtual warehousing capabilities.

This is not the only opportunity in the maritime industry, I almost forgot about the opportunity with ASC Shipbuilding to deliver 9 frigates with the first delivery scheduled for next year (https://www.baesystems.com/en-aus/what-we-do/hunter) so expect some prototypes/contracts fulfilled in 2021.

Cheers