70% of Executives Expect Favorable 2026 for Additive Manufacturing

The 3D Printing Industry Executive Survey 2026 shows 70.3% of respondents expect business conditions in 2026 to be favourable or very favourable, according to 3D Printing Industry on 19 February 2026. The survey also records that retrospective sentiment for 2025 sat at 51.2%, that the “very favourable” camp more than doubled from 9.2% to 20.3%, and that the share expecting unfavourable conditions collapsed from 20% to just 6.3%.

Internal company sentiment is less exuberant. The survey’s operating conditions metric found 64.1% expect favourable or very favourable operating conditions in 2026, up from 50.8% who rated 2025 positively in hindsight. Nearly 30% are still sitting in the neutral camp: not pessimistic, but not ready to expand headcount or open the capital expenditure tap either. The report distilled the gap in blunt terms: “Internal confidence lags improving external outlook.”

Those headline gains come with caveats inside the survey’s open responses. “Those are striking numbers. But spend time with the open-ended responses from executives, and a more complicated picture emerges,” the publication states, and it flags that “Customer education and qualification remain persistent bottlenecks.” That combination helps explain why external market optimism outpaces readiness to hire or spend at the company level.

Longer-running industry measures track similar themes. Jabil notes that “since 2017, our biennial survey of additive manufacturing decision-makers has assessed the industry's pulse,” and its recent findings say additive manufacturing continues to flourish, playing a pivotal role in designing and producing goods. Jabil reports confidence in 3D-printed products has surged among manufacturers, that 3D printing is predominantly employed in prototyping and design and is expected to expedite product delivery, that custom-engineered materials are gaining traction with two thirds of respondents integrating them, that more than 50% of top executives regard AM as a strategic opportunity, and that 40% of senior leaders consider 3D printing an alternative method for designing or producing products.

Company examples underline the scaling imperative identified by executives. Brigitte de Vet-Veithen, who became CEO of Materialise NV in January 2024, points to the medical sector as proof-of-concept: Materialise delivers about 280,000 3D-printed implants and medical instruments annually, including 160,000 for the U.S. market. “My hope for the future is that we have continued relevance. I do think we will see potentially less fancy technology. We already have very robust and working technology. What I think we need are more applications that scale where we as an industry have the duty to bring solutions to companies that want to scale. We’re not quite there yet. But I do believe over the next couple of years, we’ll see more of that happen,” she told AdvancedManufacturing. “I’m very confident of this because we’ve seen some meaningful applications scale in the medical sector. I think we have very good examples of that, and I absolutely believe that we can apply that to other applications and industries.”

Corporate initiatives are following the sentiment shift. Deutsche Bahn headlined a climate-focused project as “Deutsche Bahn makes every 3D print count for the climate with new CO₂ reporting tool,” illustrated by an image of a Deutsche Bahn high-speed train alongside logos of 3D Spark and DB. The juxtaposition of climate reporting and production-scale examples such as Materialise frames a practical industry move from proofs of concept toward serial application.

The 3DPI survey and related industry data point to a 2026 characterized by cautious optimism: stronger external business forecasts, rising adoption of custom materials and strategic recognition by executives, but persistent internal caution on hiring and CapEx and ongoing barriers in customer education and qualification. The excerpts provided do not include sample size or respondent breakdowns for the 3DPI Exec Survey 2026, a gap that tempers interpretation even as executives like de Vet-Veithen forecast scaled applications in the next couple of years.