While those numbers are small, consider: If you had a machine shop, you purchase raw metal stock; rods, sheets, billets and such. Then you machined them as required, meaning you needed a lath, a milling machine, grinding an polishing wheels and plenty of cutting heads. If you were a hobbyist, and you cast your own metals, you needed a high temperature kiln and a room to operate it in. All of which is high skill, dangerous and expensive as well as labor intensive.
A 3DP, on the other hand, requires none of these things, nor the skill or the labor, it delivers the finished part. So the question facing the user is; several machines and the skills to use them or a 3DP'er. So that's how these printers are going to wind up selling by the score, since there are a large number of people already working with metals in machine shops, repair shops and maintenance room across the globe. My guess is that people will first try the service bureaus to see what kind of quality they can expect on the cheap. Once they're satisfied they will seek to have their own 3DP's. Obviously a mere few hundred machines is hardly going to satisfy a global demand. So, expect these numbers to increase very rapidly at some point in the near future.
In the first ten or so years of the personal computer, when installing and running programs became as easy as pointing and clicking, sales went from a paltry few dozen to thousands, as offices learned how much time and effort, was cut from preparing documents and retrieving data, and the storage of files. So many man hours and expenses were cut from the data handling stream, that no one could be competitive using the old manual systems. Of course, the "old manual systems" were comprised of tens of thousands of typists, ten key adding machines and huge pools of skilled operators. The computer rapidly shrank those pools and the expenses that went with them.
While 3DP is going to actually grow the number of people who are capable of producing objects and parts. So, use may not grow as quickly as the computer did, because the computer was cutting cost already in place. 3DP will gradually make more people aware that they can make parts and things, without so many skills and so much expensive equipment.
Meanwhile the industrial outfits need to get ahead of the curve, or see themselves fall victim to a spreading entrepreneurial environment that will first remove the easy work from their balance sheets. So they must discover ahead of the public, what work they will still be needed to do, and plan to shed the work that anyone will be able to do.
So, it's a long road ahead, but the upward curve will very rapidly grow steeper and steeper for quite some time to come. In these early years the word "competition" means little to nothing.
