It seems to me they've ignored time in their cost equation. An injection mold can kick out dozens of widgets in a hour; how much time would it take for a 3D printer to print one widget? If your company needs several hundred widgets quickly, wouldn't this enter into your calculations?
The 3D printer will produce the mold/molds. The idea that 3D printing will "do it all" is ludicrous.
Final manufacturing will be a meld of 3D and regular machining and/or other processes, probably a with workstations doing "additive" unit operations/parts, followed by "subtractive" (CNC machining)for surface finish and tight tolerances, with robot arms moving parts between the workstations and automating the setups.
It seems to me they've ignored time in their cost equation. An injection mold can kick out dozens of widgets in a hour; how much time would it take for a 3D printer to print one widget? If your company needs several hundred widgets quickly, wouldn't this enter into your calculations?"At the same cost and quality, companies will always choose the flexibility of 3D printing over mass production. At the same cost and quality, 3D printing irreversibly overtakes conventional manufacturing as the preferred method of production."
I take it that you are assuming only one 3D printer. That won’t be the case when wonderful 3D printers are dirt cheap. Which is a necessary condition for 3D printers to deliver “the same cost and quality."The theory, I take it, is that the 3D printers will self-replicate, driving down their cost toward that of the “ink” it takes to manufacture them.
You are stuck in the old business model of mass-producing a widget in a central location and then distributing it.
The 3D business model is the opposite in that the widgets are printed on demand by the end users (who have their own 3D printers).
So instead of making say 500,000 widgets at a factory and then shipping them to 40,000 customers, you now have 40,000 customers with their own 3D printers and you just send them the file and charge a fee for each widget produced.
Most of those 40,000 customers will only be printing a few of them so the speed is now not a factor. Others with high volume needs will likely have more than one 3D printer or they will outsource as needed.