At 8:48 today someone brought 61,000 shares at 34.47 pushing up to 34.61 in pre-market trading. This could be portentous of things to come, eh?
By time HP comes to market with their plastics only printer, the market will have moved almost entirely to metals and other materials. As I expected, the press release/market transcript suggests that metal printing is vastly more complex than it seemed at first blush. There are so many specialty alloys that a metallurgist team is needed just to keep up. Then there's tungsten, which I believe will become a new demand for tools made of it, since it's high melting point at 4900 degrees makes it an ideal material to fashion paddles to stir molten metals, to ensure more uniformly mixed alloys. That's a real problem for fabricators of things like bells. Where the uneven mixture causes only one in 10 bells to ring correctly and not crack.
In any event, we already have a metallurgical team in place and working on problems H-P hasn't even dreamed of yet. Our color team is already in place and that's another area of quite some complexity, much more than the common man knows about, so going forward they're going to be adding value big time. Just google "Pantone" to have a look at the field of color.
All of which is to say that I believe that our so called competition will actually devolve into becoming mere salesmen for DDD's greater diversity of products. Since customers don't like hearing "We can't do that yet", especially when they're reading that DDD can do it already. SSYS is already using our service bureaus for materials they don't handle, and they've got to add something to whatever price we charge them. So their customers are dealing with us through a middleman. Believe me customers don't like being middlemaned and when they find out that they have been, it's look out below. LOL.
Lastly, I thought we'd hit a sales plateau but this wasn't it at all, what we've been dealing with is nothing more or less than simply "growing pains", every new industry and company has them. Where they either fall behind demand or the market moves in some unexpected direction, so they need to change gears. As you probably already know, growing pains don't last very long and usually portend much good for the fleet footed companies that can deal with them.
Happy investing all.
