Desktop Metal, the company committed to making metal 3D printing accessible to manufacturers and engineers, announced today a strategic partnership with Indo-MIM, the global leader and world’s largest supplier of Metal Injection Molding (MIM) precision-engineered products with over 100 million metal parts produced annually for leading global OEMs. Together, Desktop Metal and Indo-MIM will offer innovative solutions to enable companies around the world to design and produce metal additively manufactured parts at scale and shorten time to market.
As one of the first companies to deploy the Desktop Metal Production System in its state-of-the-art factories, Indo-MIM will draw upon its renowned expertise in design, tooling, sintering, materials, and its full range of finishing and assembly operations, to deliver high-precision metal 3D printed parts to companies spanning the automotive, aerospace, medical, industrial machinery industries and more. As a strategic partner, Indo-MIM will become a full-service manufacturing partner for Desktop Metal, providing companies looking for a wide range of mass production with quantities of high-quality metal parts, ranging from tens of thousands to one million. Indo-MIM will also offer customers consulting services around downstream manufacturing and finishing processes key to going to production with metal additive manufacturing.
“This is a major step forward in the progress of additive manufacturing,” said Krishna Chivukula, Jr., CEO of Indo-MIM. “As the world’s largest MIM house, we know our customers in automotive, aerospace and other key industries will reap the benefits of this new mass manufacturing technology. We are excited to partner with Desktop Metal to bring metal additive manufacturing closer to those companies looking to achieve the speed, cost, and quality benefits to their businesses. With the Production System now joining our state-of-the-art factories, we will be fully integrated to provide customers with a one-stop resource for the manufacturing of complex precision components and sub-assemblies with additive manufacturing.”
Powered by Single Pass Jetting technology, the Production System is the world’s first and only metal 3D printing system for mass production that delivers the speed, quality, and cost-per-part needed to compete with traditional manufacturing processes. More than four times faster than any binder jet competitor, the system offers a 100 times speed improvement over any laser-based system. The Production System, which is designed to print a broad range of alloys, including reactive metals such as titanium and aluminum, enables the use of metal powders that are 80 percent lower cost than laser powder bed fusion metals, delivering parts at 1/20th the cost. Designed around the MIM chemistry and powder supply chain, the Production System allows access to a large and established ecosystem of low-cost, high-quality alloys with a mature supply chain and well-studied controls.
“The synergies of our companies are profound — both Desktop Metal and Indo-MIM are deeply rooted in MIM technology and we share an unbridled commitment to accelerate the availability of industrial additive manufacturing technologies,” said Ric Fulop, CEO and co-founder of Desktop Metal. “This collaboration with Indo-MIM will help deliver the power and promise of our Production System to companies with diverse manufacturing needs and to shift the paradigm from prototyping to include full scale metal manufacturing.”
Indo-MIM will install the Production System in its San Antonio, Texas factory this summer and begin working with customers as early as fall 2019.
