There’s a showdown coming between the biggest 3D print trade shows in North America.
For many years the 3D print tradeshow space in North America was dominated by Rapid+TCT. Our team has attended this event on many occasions, and in recent years it’s had 400 or more exhibitors. It’s put on by SME, and offers a great opportunity for attendees to see new equipment, materials and software related to additive manufacturing.
Typically the event is held in late May or early June, and that’s been the case for a very long time.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the ocean there’s another major 3D print event, Formnext, by Mesago. Formnext emerged from the ashes of the now defunct Euromold event back in 2014. The event is always held in Frankfurt, Germany in November, and is the largest event of its kind on the planet. It’s usually about twice the size of Rapid+TCT, with around 800 exhibitors and tens of thousands of attendees.
Message has previously launched regional Formnext events in Asia, but now they are landing in the USA. They’ve scheduled a large event, Formnext Chicago, for April 8-10, 2025.
Coincidentally, Rapid+TCT 2025 is scheduled for April 8-10, 2025 in Detroit. Maybe this isn’t a coincidence…
This has to be concerning to SME, as it puts manufacturers in a difficult position: with a limited marketing budget, at which show do they exhibit? They almost certainly cannot afford to do both — and they probably don’t have two crews to work simultaneous shows.
Decisions must be made.
Those decisions will determine the fate of both shows. If one show attracts more exhibitors, it likely will attract more visitors — and those visitors are potential buyers. Whichever show succeeds the most this year will gain an enormous boost next year: 2026 exhibitors will have direct evidence of which show is larger.
It may be that one or these two shows may fade away as a result of this direct, head-to-head competition. This is precisely what happened to Euromold two years ago: the exhibitors decided they wanted to be at Formnext, and Euromold rapidly shrank and basically disappeared a year later.
Can we gain any understanding of where things are headed right now? One way is to look at the current state of the floor plans of the two events. As of this writing, here is the Rapid+TCT floor plan for 2025:
And here is the Formnext Chicago 2025 floor plan:
It appears that Rapid+TCT has many more exhibitors committed, and indeed more raw space. However, both have substantial empty spots. Curiously, Nexa3D, EOS appears on both floor maps. HP and Nikon SLM appear only on the Formnext floor plan, while Stratasys and others are only on the Rapid+TCT floor plan.
Our team has not yet made a decision on this event. We’re going to attend one of them — but we can’t be at both. That’s too expensive and there’s only one team. If the events weren’t on the same days we might have an option to go to both, but it’s still expensive to make two trips.
This is the same question now being considered by attendees, exhibitors, media and others in the industry.
We can’t know how this battle will end in the long term, but it will be interesting to watch.
Via Formnext Chicago and Rapid+TCT
