3D-printing manufacturer Stratasys Inc. said Friday that federal officials have approved its merger with the subsidiary of an Israeli company, making the Eden Prairie company a bigger player in the growing global market for machines that create three-dimensional product prototypes.
Stratasys said the Committee on Foreign Investment has green-lighted its union with Objet Ltd. in Rehovot, Israel. The two companies expect the merger to close no later than Dec. 6.
Stratasys has attracted investor interest because of the pending merger and because of a growing belief that three-dimensional prototyping is a hot market with relatively few competitors, said Steven Dyer, an analyst at Minneapolis-based Craig-Hallum Capital Group.
The stock closed at $74.95 on Friday, down $2.08, or nearly 3 percent. On Jan. 3, the first trading day of the year, Stratasys stock closed at $31.09 -- so it's gained 141 percent for the year.
Stratasys makes rapid prototyping machines that spray and bake plastic into precise replicas of new products ranging from tools to coffeepots. Industrial corporations can feed electronic product diagrams into the machines to generate instant physical models. In addition to selling the machines, Stratasys sells special plastics, called consumables, that its machines use to make the prototypes.
3D-prototyping technology has the potential to become an early form of just-in-time manufacturing, in which companies would use machines from Stratasys and other firms to create production-grade parts instead of just prototypes.
The Economist, a British magazine, has called making three-dimensional objects without traditional manufacturing potentially revolutionary. General Electric Aviation already is working on adapting 3D-prototyping gear that will build production jet engine parts, the magazine said.
But Dyer says there are more technical hurdles to overcome before that becomes practical. For one thing, Stratasys machines today work only with plastic, not metal, which limits their ability to manufacture machine parts.