General Electric has an agreement in place to buy a 75% stake in additive-manufacturing technology developer Concept Laser GmbH for $599 million (€549 million), with terms that allow GE to take full ownership in a number of years. The move extends GE’s recent efforts to establish itself as a “digital industrial company,” and also offsets the difficulty created when its previous bid for SLM Solutions failed to win support of that company’s major investor.
The deal is subject to customary regulatory reviews.
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Concept Laser is privately held and has over 200 employees, at its headquarters in Germany and at subsidiaries in Grapevine, Tex., and in China. It also has distributors and sales channels in place around the world.
Concept Laser designs and manufactures systems that produce metal components from powder using laser power to sinter the metal and fuse layers of material into finished, 3D designs. It calls the process LaserCUSING®, and asserts that the process creates mechanically and thermally stable, high-precision metallic parts. It is effective with stainless and tool steels, aluminum and titanium alloys, nickel-based superalloys, cobalt-chromium alloys, and precious metals like gold and silver alloys.
Its customers are manufacturers and suppliers of parts for aerospace systems, medical and dental implants, automotive parts, and jewelry.
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