MakerBot to stop making its own 3D printers, will outsource manufacturing to Jabil, a contractor with facilities in China
Sean O'Kane / The Verge :
Context & Ripple Effects
MakerBot's retreat from manufacturing is the endgame of a two-year unwind: after Jonathan Jaglom took over, the company cut about 100 jobs — 20% of staff and closed its retail stores while well-funded rivals like Carbon3D, fresh off $100M from Google Ventures, pushed into industrial-grade printing.
Handing production to Jabil — a contractor with facilities in China — completes the pivot from consumer-hype darling to an asset-light brand under parent Stratasys, whose own leadership turmoil and financial losses frame how much pressure the whole 3D-printing sector is under.
First-order effects
- MakerBot's own factory workforce bears the immediate cost, as the company that once marketed its Brooklyn-made printers now ships that work to Jabil's plants.
- Stratasys converts MakerBot from a capital-intensive manufacturer into a design-and-software brand, cutting fixed costs at a subsidiary competing in a market that never matched early sales expectations.
Second-order effects
- Jabil adds another consumer-hardware client just as 3D printer makers compete on price against better-funded entrants, deepening the contract manufacturer's grip on who actually builds devices.
- Rivals still running their own factories now face a cost benchmark set by outsourced production, pressuring them toward the same make-or-buy decision or further consolidation.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, desktop 3D printing consolidates into a structure familiar from other consumer hardware: a few brands designing products while contract manufacturers — increasingly concentrated, as BYD's dominance in iPad assembly shows — own the actual production.
- The move marks the quiet close of the maker-era premise that consumer 3D printers would be a mass-market category built by enthusiast-founded companies; what survives is enterprise-focused players like Stratasys and Carbon3D.
The trend: Consumer hardware companies are shedding owned factories for contract manufacturers as the desktop 3D printer market shrinks to a few enterprise-backed survivors.