- 2 years ago
Sales Training for Competing
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00:00Hello and welcome to today's training presentation about competition which is
00:09quite an interesting subject. So let's start. Who is our competition? I mean
00:15mainly it's one company. It's Markforged. So we simply focus on Markforged for
00:24the purpose of this session. So before we get started I have prepared this little
00:31so-called SWOT analysis which guides you through some strengths, weaknesses,
00:36opportunities for us and threats for us. So quite obviously Markforged is a pretty
00:41decent marketing machine. They have tons of success stories, they have pretty nice
00:46looking parts, they have pretty loyal clients, good channel partners, quite easy
00:53to use software and some automation tools as well. But they have some serious
00:59weaknesses which is price. It's not only the price of the machine, it's also the
01:04price of the materials which you can only purchase from them. The closed
01:09material systems which doesn't allow you to select any kind of plastic you want
01:13to print. Their financial stability is questionable. Their operating margins on
01:20printers is pretty low which means they can also not give enough money to their
01:24partners which make some kind of weak in itself. So our opportunity is quite
01:33obviously first of all to educate the market that there is another vendor and
01:40to highlight our strengths like open materials systems like free fiber
01:46positioning, like the amortization of our printers, the return on invest. We will get a little bit deeper in this in the following
01:54slides. There are some threats to us as well. What if they get purchased by a
02:01larger vendor and all of a sudden they have money to spend, they can drop the
02:05prices of their printers. So well we need to have a closer look at it. So for now
02:10let's continue and let's get started with our composer platform. Composer A4
02:18and A3. I mean I don't need to elaborate on this slide too much. You see the build
02:25volume, the printer footprint and some material information and stuff like this.
02:34But let's look now at the Markforged site. So who are the competitors against A4 and
02:43A3? Quite obviously it's Mark II and X7 which come kind to a similar build
02:52size you know. But just have a look at the cost. The Mark II is at 20k, our A4 is
03:03at 15k. So we are already 5k cheaper but also the service plan. So if you want to
03:11purchase additional service plans it is actually 10% of the machine price per
03:19year. And we sell our three-year service plan so I just divided it for the ease
03:27of this comparison. It comes for 1k. So this is a difference in itself. It gets
03:37even worse for the X7 because this machine actually sells for 70k. I mean
03:43the street price now is at 60k but 70k is the MSRP. And our A3 sells for 27k.
03:52And again service plan comes on top. So this is just a basic price comparison.
04:01Let's look a little bit deeper what you actually can do with the machines. So
04:07first let's start with materials. You can print their nylon PA6 which is called
04:15Onyx. And they offer a PLA and a TPU. Whereas with an isoprint you can print
04:24basically every material which is within the printer specifications. So which
04:31suits our nozzles and extruders and stuff like this. Also they have issues
04:37with the fiber placement. So because with Narkforge technology you can only put
04:45fibers let's say around the circumference of a part or around holes
04:50or you can basically print the whole surface in fibers in different angles.
04:56But you cannot print infill or you cannot build lattice structures or you
05:02cannot have masks like we do where we have very specific fiber printing. For
05:11fibers they offer carbon, Kevlar and glass fiber. We offer carbon and basalt.
05:16But the material price this is really when Narkforge clients start
05:23struggling. You know the Onyx spool sells for 220 euros. A comparable spool on
05:31our end is 90 euros. The same is true for the carbon for about 150 cubic
05:38centimeter they charge 500 euros. For us 750 meter I'm not absolutely sure how
05:44this compares with 150 cubic centimeters but we sell it for 350.
05:52Now let's do a more specific comparison with this part which you see on the
06:02upper right corner. I used Narkforge slicer Aiger and our own slicer Aura to
06:10have really a very good comparison. So this part is printed with nylon. It is
06:17printed with carbon fiber reinforcement throughout all the outer and inner walls
06:23of this part. I use the identical settings for both printers so the print
06:29time is 33 hours. Our print time is longer it's 43 hours but have a look at
06:37the material cost because both slicers give you detailed information about how
06:42much material you spend on this print and so the material cost on Narkforge is
06:49extremely high it's 230 euros whereas on the A3 it's 118 euros. But what most
06:57people don't calculate but actually it's a must is the depreciation. So when you
07:05buy a printer usually in 3d printing that depreciation period is three years
07:10and if you divide those three years by 365 days and 24 hours assuming this
07:20machine is running 24 7 but anyway let's do it for the moment to have a real good
07:26comparison you need to divide the printer price plus three years of
07:34service plan with these numbers and this gives you an hourly rate and the
07:41last step is to multiply the hourly rate with a print time. So also our print
07:49time is much higher than Narkforge due to the high cost of the machine it's
07:55quite obvious that the depreciation cost of this print sums up to be 114
08:03euro compared to 49 euro on our end so the overall cost of the print which is a
08:13combination of material cost and the hourly cost of the machine is actually
08:20344 euro compared to 167 euro on our end so well it's less it's it's a it's
08:30actually 48% of the Narkforge price so a reduction by 52% and think about this
08:45way if this machine is used regularly so it prints kind of 200 parts a year
08:53well this is 200 parts multiplied by let's say a hundred euro in
09:01savings is 20k so we call this actually the total cost of ownership which is a
09:10combination of material cost, service cost, hourly cost of the machine which is
09:18actually pretty important to do this. So let's go to the next machine which is
09:25our Composer Nobar. Again here you see the basic specifications of this
09:32machine. Now let's compare this and as a competitive machine I choose the
09:40Narkforge FX-10 and again you see the huge huge price difference in both the
09:49purchase price and the price for service plans and again you have the different
09:57specifications of both machines when it comes to materials, fiber placement,
10:04and so far and so on but it is also some pretty important differences in number
10:13of printheads which means with our machine we can print for instance
10:19soluble supports or we can do multi material prints and by the way this
10:27machine right now as we record this session is just printing nylon and
10:33carbon fiber nothing else no PLA no TPU no Kevlar no glass fiber it's just this
10:42combination nylon and carbon fiber and again I did a comparison so for the FX-10
10:51to Nobar comparison it's even worse I mean based on the super high price of
10:57this printer also is quite faster than our printer you can look at the material
11:03cost and for in particular the hourly cost of this printer multiplied by 20
11:11through hours sums up for this individual part to 341 euro you spend
11:20for your machine only. In a sense this means our print process including printer
11:31price, services, materials is 70% lower than the comparable FX-10 plus we have
11:44some serious other advantages over this machine. I think for clients this is
11:50really really an important measure so please make sure to use this information
11:57wisely because they need to look at the total cost of ownership they need to
12:04look how they can leverage the machine so it actually saves money and it pays
12:13itself. To me this seems out already be almost impossible with the FX-10.
12:20Let's move on. Here is our promise 500 so again you see all the basic
12:28specifications let's compare this with an FX-20. Well you can buy the FX-20 only
12:37with the service plan first of all there is no way to buy just the printer
12:42without a service plan actually you are forced to buy a three-year service plan
12:47so the overall price of the printer is not 230 actually it's 300k so assuming
12:54we will charge 10k for a service plan for the promise well it's the same price
13:00almost 300k for three years but again you have some serious restrictions with
13:07the FX-20. It only prints PA6N Ultem and now it prints also a new material
13:14called Vega which is a PEKK but we can print all materials so we don't have
13:23this limitations to very specific materials and by the way the Vega
13:30material and you can see this in the material cost section of this table it's
13:38actually 3,200 euro for 3,200 cubic centimeters so it's basically one euro
13:48per cubic centimeter whereas if you buy a PEKK from the open market for
13:59filaments well it's about 575 euro per 2.5 kilogram and again our machine has
14:12multiple printers so we are able to do multi material prints we are able to
14:20leverage kind of exotic material combinations think about printing TPU
14:26with fibers for instance so again from from the basic specifications we are
14:36actually superior. Here the comparison because we have actually the identical
14:44price and the FX-20 is horrible fast honestly it's it's really super fast and
14:51ours is let's say a little bit slower so since we need more print time even the
14:58reduction in the material cost doesn't fit very well so we end up be almost the
15:07same price for printing a part like this example for this one I sliced it by the
15:13way in in in both Aura and Eiger and leveraging the settings for a PEKK and
15:26a Vega for the FX-20 so just again to compare apples with apples and don't do
15:32something different so this was kind of the analysis of the financial effects of
15:39buying machine and using it now let's see a little bit of technology effects
15:45here you can see how we print this is our patented technology so we do a co
15:52extrusion of plastic and fiber and this is actually a weakness of Markforged
16:00because they don't do co extrusion but they simply have a second nozzle which
16:09just prints the fiber so what it basically does it irons the fiber into
16:17the previously printed layer so the cohesion between I mean this has two
16:24effects first of all the cohesion between the fiber and the previously
16:29built plastic is kind of struggling it works let's say with a nylon pretty well
16:36with Ultem they are in trouble so this is why they have developed this new
16:43material called Vega which solves some of those issues they had previously but
16:49in general the layer cohesion is not very well and as a second effect the
16:55fiber distributions of the single fiber so if you do a microscopic cut through
17:02the pin the fiber distribution is not very good because of this ironing
17:08process while ours while we are co extruding doesn't have this issue so
17:16there is a quality difference in layer cohesion and fiber distribution based on
17:20our technology compared to this more importantly I think this restricted
17:30materials philosophy is actually a big failure and it is repeated in our
17:38industry not sure why because well I'm sure why because people want to make
17:44money out of materials but let's say plastics I mean the question is why
17:55don't we have hundreds of types of plastics and if we add additives to it
18:00we have thousands of types of plastic because each material has been developed
18:05with a very specific purpose so the purpose is kind of chemical properties
18:11so thermal properties mechanical properties whatever so each plastic has
18:18very specific properties and in order to print products you you want to use
18:27those plastic with this very specific properties you won't be you don't want
18:32to be restricted to very specific materials and this is what my approach
18:38is doing so you can print the nylon you can print some PLA and one TPU and this
18:47TPU is not highly flexible I mean I have a good comparison this would be the same
18:56when I sell a CNC machine to somebody and say well but now you have to buy the
19:02steel from us you cannot produce other steel with this CNC machine I mean this
19:09is crazy why would you even imagine to do something like this they do well the
19:16customers pay for the material and a horrible amount of money so another
19:26point before we we wrap it up is kind of material the fiber positioning I mean
19:35you see those two examples on the pictures what's the difference is you
19:39can place fiber around the borders of the part and around holes and even the
19:47whole surface but what you can't do with Markforged is actually to reinforce
19:54lattice structures which you see in the upper picture or to have very specific
20:01fiber positioning like you see in this Kirsch problem we solved with this part
20:09on the left side so it is important for people to produce those parts with very
20:18specific properties and you don't want to be restricted from a system so let's
20:25talk about a software for a moment I mean I used Eiger a free version which
20:30is available Aoba is also available they also have a paid version well while we
20:38have kind of a lifetime license you need to pay them an annual subscription and
20:46it's not cheap they don't publish those prices so I tried hard to find them but
20:54they don't publish it you know so but I think when we last checked it's about a
21:03thousand dollars for the for the advanced license which includes some
21:08additional features like simulation it's about a thousand bucks per year so if
21:17you use your printer three years you already paid three thousand five years
21:21five thousand but on top of it as you can see in the last row of this table
21:28you have to pay by the number of printers so they have changed slightly
21:35just recently so you need to pay one license for one zero to three printers
21:42but if you need to have more printers you need to buy additional licenses so
21:47this is kind of how they do it you know so they they dream about making tons of
21:53money from software which doesn't work in our business yes we do have lifetime
22:00licenses it is cloud-based on Markforged site and it only runs on US Amazon
22:07servers which is in particular in Europe a big concern you know because the US
22:15government has very specific policies that they can get in touch with with
22:22your data you know and we had we will have a cloud solution in the future but
22:31right now we don't have them they do have also desktop version but again you
22:42need to pay an annual subscription of about a thousand bucks to just use the
22:47desktop version they don't have any open parameters so you cannot adjust
22:56temperatures you cannot adjust feed rates basically you can do nothing but
23:03printing so well in our open version on our paid version we do have all
23:12parameters for the 3d printer open and accessible for the user and well just to
23:20repeat it they don't have open materials yes we do have in the paid version and
23:26so there is differences in in the software which you may use in your
23:37objection handling with a client you know so let's summarize the whole
23:44session here lower total cost of ownership which means actually faster
23:50return on invest so if you use our printers this printer will repay itself
23:57in a much quicker time than each Markforged machine we saw up to 70% actually
24:04savings in cost per part which is if you if you carefully calculated a big
24:11big thing many materials versus which the strictest materials select the right
24:20material for the right application this is how plastics are supposed to work
24:27think about material mixes in multiple printers or think about soldable
24:34supports free fiber positioning versus restricted fiber positioning optimized
24:42fiber strategies for instance lattices or using a mask to guide fiber around a
24:51hole or something like this place fiber at the point of need I have tried to run
24:58simulations on SolidWorks and figure out where the maximum stresses are in the
25:03part and simply place fiber at the point of need reduces print time reduces
25:09fiber usage and reduce cost of the part actually and lastly co-extrusion versus
25:18fiber extrusion better layer coherence and better fiber distribution so if you
25:27sum it up like this I think you have some good chances to push them out of
25:36every deal you are working on good luck with this one bye bye
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