Stratasys Plans Purchases for 3-D Printing Using Metals

June 26, 2013 Leave a comment

Stratasys Plans Purchases for 3-D Printing Using Metals

Stratasys Ltd. (SSYS), a New York-listed maker of printers that create three-dimensional objects, plans acquisitions to expand into devices that use metals.

The company, with headquarters in Minneapolis and Israel, can maintain annual sales growth of about 20 percent without including the effect of purchases, Stratasys Chairman Scott Crump said in an interview in Beijing today.Stratasys last week said it would buy startup competitor MakerBot Industries LLC for at least $403 million to expand its consumer-product line. The company focuses more on the professional market for 3-D printers used by engineers, designers and manufacturers. Printers from both companies form plastic objects.

“Because there is so much opportunity we also we will selectively grow though M&A,” Crump said. “We have an organic project to get Stratasys into additive metal. It’s rational to say that through M&A we want to expand with different technology on a dual path.”

Stratasys fell 3.6 percent to $79.19 yesterday in New York trading. The stock has declined 1.2 percent this year, compared with a 10 percent gain for the Russell 1000 Index.

The industry will expand over the next 12 years to be worth up to $550 billion, Crump said, citing data from consultants McKinsey & Co.

Stratasys will initially issue 4.76 million of its shares in exchange for MakerBot, according to a statement this month. That will be followed by performance-based payments that could add $201 million to the purchase price, Stratasys said.

Crump didn’t give specific acquisition targets or indicate a time frame when the company might make its next purchase.

“You have to be careful what you acquire because you have to be able to manage it,” Crump said.

To contact Bloomberg News staff for this story: Edmond Lococo in Beijing at elococo@bloomberg.net

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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