Ten years after HP first showed off Multi Jet Fusion technology, the company says its 3D printing business is growing at roughly 25% a year — and it's betting a shrunk-down version of that same industrial process, the HP MJF 1200, will keep that curve climbing. In a new interview published July 29, HP additive manufacturing leaders Alex Monino, SVP and GM of HP Additive Manufacturing Solutions, and Sascha de Peña Hempel, a Distinguished Technologist at the company, walked through what a decade of MJF has actually produced, and where they think the next one is headed.
The timeline itself is worth pausing on. HP began exploring 3D printing back in 2010, four years before Multi Jet Fusion was publicly unveiled in 2014. That means the technology that eventually reshaped how HP thinks about manufacturing spent nearly half a decade in R&D before customers ever saw it — a long runway for a company better known at the time for inkjet cartridges and laser printers than for industrial polymer powder beds. In the years since, MJF has become the anchor of HP's manufacturing ambitions, and the interview frames the MJF 1200 as the next deliberate step rather than a rushed reaction to competitive pressure.
The Growth Numbers Behind the Anniversary
Monino's headline figure — the business "growing at a 25 percent rate" — is the kind of number that sounds abstract until you look at where HP says the growth is actually coming from. The interview cites expansion targets across automotive, orthotics and prosthetics (O&P), defense, drones, data centers, and robotics: a spread that says as much about HP's ambitions as its current footprint. Notably, digital adoption in the orthotics and prosthetics sector — one of the more mature use cases for MJF, where custom-fit, low-volume parts are a natural match for powder-bed fusion — sits below 8%. That's a striking figure for a technology industry insiders have been touting as production-ready for years. It suggests two things at once: that O&P remains a long-term growth lane HP is nowhere near exhausting, and that even in applications considered a good fit for the technology, the shift from traditional fabrication methods to digital manufacturing is still in its early innings.
That gap between potential and adoption is essentially the business case HP is making for the MJF 1200. If digital manufacturing is going to move past pilot programs and boutique bureaus into the kind of volume that supports 25%-a-year growth, the printers doing the work need to get cheaper and more accessible — without becoming toy versions of the machines that made MJF's reputation in the first place.
What the MJF 1200 Actually Is
According to HP's official announcement at RAPID+TCT, the MJF 1200 is built around a 12-liter build volume — modest next to HP's 4200- and 5600-series production systems, but running the same core Multi Jet Fusion process. That's the load-bearing claim in the launch: this isn't a scaled-back or simplified variant of MJF, it's the identical fusing and detailing agent process shrunk into a smaller footprint and a lower acquisition cost. HP says the MJF 1200 will launch in early 2027; the company has not disclosed exact pricing, but frames the smaller machine as putting full-capability MJF within reach of shops and service bureaus that could never justify the capital outlay for a full production-series system.
"By lowering cost per part and simplifying workflows, we are making it easier for customers to adopt additive manufacturing and scale it across new applications," Monino said in the announcement. That framing — cost per part and workflow simplicity, rather than raw throughput — is consistent with the growth numbers from the interview. If the constraint on wider adoption really is the sub-8% adoption gap rather than a lack of demand, then a lower entry price and a smaller machine that still produces industrial-grade output is a more direct lever than simply making the big machines bigger or faster.
HP also cited feedback from an early tester, Anima Design, which the company says praised the MJF 1200 for delivering "industrial-grade parts in a compact format." That's the phrase HP clearly wants attached to this launch — not "entry-level," not "prosumer," but a genuine production process at a scale that fits in a smaller facility.
What It Means for Makers
For most hobbyists running FDM or resin printers on a bench, the MJF 1200 isn't a machine they'll ever own. HP hasn't disclosed pricing, but a smaller-footprint industrial powder-bed system pitched at shops and service bureaus is still firmly in small-manufacturer territory, not desktop territory. But it matters to makers in a more indirect way: it's a signal about where accessible, on-demand production capacity is headed. A wider base of shops running true powder-bed MJF at a lower capital cost means more local and regional options for makers, designers, and small businesses who need production-grade nylon parts — end-use brackets, jigs, orthotic devices, small-batch functional prototypes — without shipping files to a handful of large service bureaus and waiting in a queue.
It's also a useful data point on where the broader industry consensus is settling. HP isn't claiming MJF is about to replace injection molding at scale; the sub-8% adoption figure in orthotics and prosthetics, an application area MJF has served for years, undercuts any narrative of imminent mass displacement. Instead, the message from both the anniversary interview and the MJF 1200 launch is one of steady, compounding growth — a technology maturing into adjacent markets one vertical at a time, with cost and workflow friction, not capability, cited as the remaining barrier. For makers watching the industrial end of the market, that's a more useful signal than any single machine spec: powder-bed fusion is getting cheaper to access, and HP is betting that cheaper access is what finally moves the adoption numbers.
