Reporter |
Editor | Liu Fangyuan
Back in 2013, four young engineers, all 24 years old, met for the first time at a 3D printing expo in Shenzhen.
At that expo, it was all industrial-grade gear, with maybe a couple of so-called consumer-grade products thrown in. But the price tag? No less than 30,000 to 40,000 yuan, and every brand was foreign. Stuff made for regular folks, but regular folks couldn’t afford it at all.
After walking around, the four of them all reached the same conclusion: this market might be hiding a massive opportunity. The next year, they pooled together about 300,000 yuan, rented a tiny office less than 20 square meters in Longhua, Shenzhen, and started building “cheap” 3D printers.
Twelve years later, this company named Creality officially listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. On its first day, it surged 84% at the open, closing at 22.8 Hong Kong dollars per share, with a market cap of 10.6 billion Hong Kong dollars—becoming the hot “First Share of 3D Printing.”
Creality’s hot reception from the capital market is partly thanks to the booming IPO scene in Hong Kong. But the bigger reason is the sizzling heat around the 3D printing track itself.
In 2025, China’s consumer-grade 3D printing industry broke through three “ten-billion” milestones: export scale crossed 10 billion yuan for the first time, annual total investment and financing neared 10 billion yuan, and the first company with annual revenue over 10 billion yuan emerged—Bambu Lab. It’s Creality’s fiercest competitor, and also the hottest star in the consumer electronics world.
Bambu Lab’s rapid revenue and profit growth has really ignited investment enthusiasm across the entire 3D printing track. And Creality’s IPO just poured more fuel on the fire for 3D printing and the whole maker scene.
The Catfish
3D printing isn’t exactly a new idea. Ten years ago, the Pearl River Delta was full of mature 3D printing prototype shops, offering super-low costs and high efficiency to provide rapid prototyping services for manufacturers around the world before mass production tooling.
But back then, 3D printing was still mostly stuck in the industrial world. That’s exactly what got a bunch of entrepreneurs who smelled opportunity itching to make a move.
Creality was the fastest runner among them. In 2016, Creality launched the CR-10, and made a name for itself with a “half-price beats foreign rivals” strategy—back then, similar products from overseas were usually over a thousand dollars, but the CR-10 sold for just five or six hundred. That year, they shipped over 20,000 units, twenty times the industry average.
After that, Creality dropped another “blockbuster”—the Ender-3 series, with cumulative sales topping 3 million units, cementing its spot in the first tier of the industry.
The European and American markets are the main sales base for this wave of consumer-grade 3D printers. Overseas, communities like Reddit’s 3D printing sub have millions of active users. The biggest buying groups? Students, engineers, garage makers, plus a few cosplay and prop-making circles.
In 2018, also in Shenzhen, Anycubic and Elegoo started catching up, carving out their own space with resin-based SLA printing tech. Thanks to the unique manufacturing advantages of the Pearl River Delta, the global consumer 3D printing market was quickly surrounded by Chinese players.
But back then, all these early players hit the same ceiling—they just couldn’t break out to audiences beyond hardcore users.
Bambu Lab’s CTO, Gao Xiufeng, once pointed out: until 2020, 3D printers were basically still a “dumb product.” Complicated to operate, slow to print, and not very precise—more like a toy for makers. With such clunky machines, users spent tons of time fixing them, and the prints often came out as a mess of tangled filament—what folks call “fried noodles.”
Then Bambu Lab came along like a catfish and changed everything.
Bambu Lab’s founder, Tao Ye, used to run DJI’s consumer drone division and led the development of hit products like the Mavic series. His four co-founders also had experience at DJI in algorithms, engineering, product definition, and more. They not only knew how to apply advanced algorithms to 3D printing gear, but also how to package complex tech into a consumer product that could be mass-produced at scale.
In 2022, Bambu Lab launched its first desktop 3D printer, the Bambu Lab X1 series—a product hailed as the “iPhone moment” for 3D printing, starting at $999.
The X1’s biggest contribution was cramming tech that used to be only in industrial-grade machines into a consumer-grade product. Regular users no longer need to calibrate or level the device themselves. If you can use a smartphone, you can use this 3D printer. And its printing speed jumped from under 200mm/s on traditional machines to 500mm/s.
After the X1 successfully cracked the market, Bambu Lab launched the mid-range P series in 2023, pushing into lower price points.
A CMO at another 3D printing company told us that when the P1S came out, everyone in the industry thought Bambu Lab was losing its mind by going cheap. But looking back now, that product’s timing was spot-on. “In 2022, Bambu Lab’s revenue was just a few hundred million. The P1S helped them hit 2 billion in 2023.”
Bambu Lab dramatically lowered the barrier to 3D printing. Lots of ordinary consumers might not care at all about stepper motors or leveling, but they are happy to pay for “open the box and it works.” Bambu Lab lets them use a 3D printer like a microwave—tap “print” on a phone app, and a few hours later they’ve got a finished piece. Folks call it “harvesting.”
Back in China, parents are the biggest new group of 3D printing users. Fu Xiang, the deputy store manager of INNO100’s global flagship store in Shenzhen, told us that 3D printers are one of the most popular categories in the store, and the customers with the strongest buying urge are parents aged 30 to 40. They’re eager to let their kids get into trendy tech, and they also enjoy the family fun of doing it together.
Making 3D printers easy for ordinary parents and students to use—that’s thanks in big part to MakerWorld, the 3D model content community built by Bambu Lab. Looking back, this turned out to be one of the smartest early moves Bambu Lab made. MakerWorld has now grown into the world’s largest 3D model community, with tens of millions of monthly active users.
Bambu Lab encourages users and professional designers to create and share models on MakerWorld. The platform now boasts over a million models total. Opening MakerWorld feels a bit like “shopping”—models range from handy tools and home decorations to artistic trinkets. Pick one, connect your printer, load the filament, and you’re ready to print seamlessly.
“Hardware is the ‘1,’ software is the ‘0.’ Without the hardware shipment advantage, MakerWorld would be tough to build. But software can be lots of ‘zeros’ after that ‘1’—the bigger it gets, the more it feeds back into hardware, and the bigger the ripple effect to expand the entire 3D printing market,” said Dongfang Liang, head of the MakerWorld community, in an interview.
Copy the Benchmark, or Become Yourself?
In the consumer 3D printing industry, Bambu Lab, Elegoo, Creality, and Anycubic are known as the “Four Little Dragons.” Together they hold over 90% of the global market share, with nearly 70% of sales coming from European and American markets.
Among them, Bambu Lab’s revenue last year topped 10 billion yuan. Over the same period, Elegoo’s revenue was 2.5 billion, and Creality’s was 3.127 billion. Besides selling hardware, filaments themselves are a goldmine. Chen Bo, co-founder of Elegoo, told us that last year Elegoo shipped over 10,000 tons of filament—already comparable to a specialized filament supplier.
It’s no surprise that all “Four Little Dragons” come from Shenzhen. Chen Bo once described the edge of Chinese 3D printing firms like this: “Made in China, a total game-changer. Our supply chain can deliver products at a third or even a fifth of the cost of foreign rivals. In other words, I can do whatever I want.”
The four companies have very different styles. Bambu Lab, with its DJI roots, is more mysterious. The founding teams of Elegoo and Anycubic both come from trading backgrounds, so they’re sharper on market shifts. One employee at one of these firms put it: the market is big enough that everyone can make money, and they prefer to “keep quiet and get rich.” That’s classic Guangdong entrepreneur behavior.
Consumer 3D printers mainly come in two tech flavors: Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) and resin-based SLA. FDM is the most common for consumer use—lower machine and filament costs, beginner-friendly, and the go-to for hobbyist makers. But it lacks precision, which is the path Bambu Lab chose.
Resin SLA offers higher precision but also higher filament costs, better suited for advanced creators or professional applications. Creality and Elegoo are both big in resin printing, and they’re also making moves in the more beginner-friendly FDM market.
Competition is getting fiercer—everyone in the industry agrees.
In August 2025, the 3D printing brand Snapmaker’s flagship product, the U1, raised over 150 million yuan on a crowdfunding platform, becoming the highest-funded 3D printing project in global history.
The Snapmaker team told us that in 2022, the company was on the brink of survival. One product, the U1, turned things around and attracted investments from big names like Meituan, Hillhouse, and Shunwei.
More and more companies are getting pushed into the spotlight, and capital is starting to sniff around 3D printing targets intensely. More than one leading 3D printing company told us that the problem now is not finding money, but figuring out how to turn money away.
Over the past year, the number of institutions knocking on their doors has multiplied several times, even more than ten times, and the “Big Names” are more common. One company even had an investor approach them right after a presentation: “When are you opening your next funding round? We really want in.”
Elegoo completed two funding rounds in the last half year. The first round came from DJI, which rarely invests externally. The second round was co-invested by Meituan, Shenzhen Capital Group, Hillhouse, Yintai, and others. Atom Remake, which spun off from Dreame, has also completed three rounds so far.
According to our sources, Tencent also participated in investment talks with Bambu Lab last year, but they didn’t finalize a deal. Interestingly, Tencent is also an early shareholder of Creality.
Almost all companies, including Creality, get asked the same question by investors: “What’s your difference from Bambu Lab?”
A veteran of the 3D industry commented to us that Bambu Lab’s advantage is its “saturation-style R&D system” inherited from DJI, plus its mastery of the “hardware premiumization + software ecosystem + rapid iteration” playbook. That’s why it could make the market come alive.
“When they make a product, they might try out every possibility in a short time. If one of them can succeed, they pour all resources into it. This is a proven system from a big company, but it’s not something small firms can play at.” In his view, this mature R&D system has allowed Bambu Lab to accumulate a huge amount of reusable tech assets.
Bambu Lab’s impact isn’t just on products—it’s also indirectly raised the pay for people in the 3D printing field. More than one Bambu Lab employee told us that founder Tao Ye values sharing profits and is “extremely generous” with compensation. Looking at public job postings, some senior positions already offer salaries comparable to top-tier internet companies. And to compete for talent, other manufacturers have bumped up their pay as well.
“If you just try to copy Bambu Lab, you’ll never become the next one. Only by walking your own path can you become the first you,” said the veteran.
Printing Everything
Why are DIY devices like 3D printers so popular? It’s because of an ultimate vision—with advantages in customization, lightweight production, and efficiency, 3D printing will one day be able to make anything.
That vision is already taking shape. For individual makers, on communities like MakerWorld, you can already print tons of everyday items with very low barriers. And in industrial applications, the lattice midsole of Adidas running shoes, the skeleton structure of XPeng’s robot IRON, the nozzle of a SpaceX rocket engine—you can see 3D printing everywhere.
Consumer 3D printers have also spawned a new kind of business: the “print farm.” It’s like a mini factory that runs a bunch of 3D printers, continuously printing and selling printing services or finished products. Even one person with a few machines can start a print farm. On platforms like Xiaohongshu and TikTok, many farm owners are making a killing by printing everyday items. Industry estimates suggest there are at least 2,000 3D print farms in China.
It sounds like a pretty sweet deal, because the cost of 3D printing isn’t that high. Besides the device (FDM units start as low as a few thousand yuan, while resin ones can go up to tens of thousands), the main ongoing cost is filament. Entry-level PLA filament costs around 40 yuan per kilogram. Printing a model the size of a blind box, if you don’t count failed prints, the material cost can be as low as 1.2 yuan.
Regular folks are also getting into this creative activity. On Xiaohongshu, custom 3D-printed “cyber armor” for your cat, printing a mouse shell that perfectly fits your hand, or making a small night light—these are becoming new trends for giving gifts or treating yourself. Or maybe you can’t be bothered to buy a lens cap or guitar pick—just print one for as little as 1 yuan.
A 3D printing user named Tracy told us that since getting into 3D printing, his daily routine boils down to three words: harvest in the morning, harvest after work, harvest before bed. He says the greatest joy from 3D printing is the process of waiting for the harvest and bringing ideas to life.
Maybe that’s the main reason why maker tools like 3D printing, UV printing, and laser engraving have taken off in recent years. When creating is no longer limited by craft or cost, creativity stops being a privilege of the few.
But we’re still far from “3D printing everything.” In 2024, global shipments of consumer 3D printers were about 4 million units. This year, that’s expected to double, reaching nearly 10 million—but still not at mass adoption levels.
In Dongfang Liang’s vision, the widespread adoption of 3D printers should look like this: “Kind of like Pinduoduo—you can find a model for anything you want, and make it with very low barriers. Or, the convenience store around the corner could have a 3D printer as an affordable community service. When a commonly used item in your life breaks, the first thing you think of isn’t buying a new one, but printing one yourself.”
Chen Bo also believes that 3D printing companies should think bigger. “Everyone insists on dividing 3D printing into industrial and consumer grades—that’s a mental limitation. 3D printing is essentially a technology without any limits. It’s meant to create everything.”
To make 3D printing create everything, we need far more and higher-quality models, and even lower barriers for devices.
The head of MakerWorld told us that Bambu Lab spends hundreds of millions of yuan every year on MakerWorld—something other manufacturers can hardly match. Right now, top creators on MakerWorld can earn over a few hundred thousand yuan annually, which is a comfortable living anywhere in the world. And if you keep top creators, you open the door to creating even more quality models.
But the boundaries of model copyright are still fuzzy. There were over a thousand Labubu-related models on MakerWorld, and the phrase “free IP” went viral on social media. But then Pop Mart sued Bambu Lab for copyright infringement. Earlier, Bambu Lab also sued the model platforms of the other three “Four Little Dragons,” accusing them of copying its exclusive models.
There’s a consensus in the industry: AI is a huge help for model creation. In the past, creating models was the job of professional designers. But now ordinary users can generate simple 3D models on platforms like Tencent Hunyuan. Song Yachen, founder of 3D model company VAST, shared a thought: future 3D printers should be AI-native, allowing users to design models and print them in real time anywhere, with zero barriers.
It’s easy to predict that the advantage of standalone hardware will get thinner and thinner. The core of future competition in 3D printing will definitely be a closed-loop ecosystem. That’s why startups are racing to build their own content communities while also hugging big-platform resources. To some extent, this logic explains why Elegoo chose DJI, Creality took Tencent’s investment, and Snapmaker embraced Meituan and Shunwei’s Lei Jun.
And once the ecosystem flourishes, the era of 3D printing everything will arrive soon.
