Stratasys used its August 13 earnings call to report second-quarter 2026 results that tell two stories at once: a defense and aerospace business that keeps compounding, and a topline that is essentially treading water. Revenue for the quarter ended June 30 came in at $137.6 million, a hair below the $138.1 million posted in the same quarter last year but up 3.7% from Q1's $132.7 million. The headline number that matters more to the industrial 3D-printing world, though, is the 17% year-over-year jump in defense-sector revenue and a record $66.3 million in consumables sales — the printing materials that keep Stratasys' installed base of industrial machines running.
For a company whose fortunes have been tied for years to enterprise printer sales cycles that rise and fall with corporate capex budgets, a growing, recurring consumables line paired with expanding government work is the kind of mix investors and industry watchers have been waiting to see. It's also a reminder that in additive manufacturing, the printer is increasingly the loss leader and the materials contract is where the real, durable revenue lives.
Defense Becomes the Growth Engine
Stratasys CEO Yoav Zeif put aerospace and defense at the top of the company's priority list on the earnings call, according to reporting from 3DPrint.com. Explaining why the pending MarkForged acquisition fits Stratasys' strategy, Zeif said, "Our #1 is aerospace and defense and #2 is tooling," adding that Markforged's own focus is "completely aligned with our use cases." The 17% year-over-year growth in the aerospace and defense segment — now Stratasys' largest vertical, per 3DPrint.com — was driven specifically by U.S. Air Force sustainment work and spare-parts production: the unglamorous but lucrative business of printing replacement components for aircraft and systems that are decades old and whose original supply chains have long since dried up.
That kind of sustainment demand is a structural tailwind rather than a one-quarter blip. Military branches have spent the better part of a decade qualifying additive manufacturing for exactly this use case: producing low-volume, hard-to-source parts on demand instead of maintaining warehouses of spares or re-opening tooling for a production run that might total a few dozen units. Stratasys' polymer platforms — long a fixture in aerospace tooling and jigs — appear well suited to that pipeline, and the Air Force relationship gives the company a repeatable, budget-backed customer rather than one dependent on quarter-to-quarter enterprise IT spending.
The timing lines up with other government-facing moves. The same conference-call notice that disclosed Q2 results also flagged an August 11 funding win with America Makes and the Department of War for production-ready additive manufacturing work, and referenced Stratasys' May 27 announcement that it would acquire MarkForged — a deal that, if it closes, would bring another defense- and industrial-oriented printer maker under the Stratasys umbrella. Taken together, the pattern is a company leaning harder into government and defense channels at a moment when the broader industrial printing market has been sluggish.
Consumables Hit an All-Time High
The $66.3 million in consumables revenue is the other half of the story, and arguably the more important one for gauging the health of Stratasys' actual printer fleet. Consumables — resins, filaments, and other build materials sold for use on installed machines — are a proxy for utilization: machines that are running jobs need materials, and materials revenue tends to be stickier and higher-margin than one-time hardware sales. Zeif tied the record directly to utilization on the earnings call, saying the quarter reflected "a record-setting level of consumables sales as we continue to effectively drive recurring revenue from materials that are specifically used for manufacturing end-use parts," and that the growth "is a great indicator of the high utilization of our systems and speaks directly to our strategy to increase the manufacturing portion of our business," according to 3DPrint.com's reporting. In other words, the growth is coming from existing industrial customers running already-installed Stratasys hardware harder for end-use production, not primarily from a wave of new machine placements.
That's a meaningfully different growth story than a hardware refresh cycle, and it's one that tends to hold up better across economic cycles — printers that are already on a factory floor and qualified into a production process don't get switched out lightly, and the materials spend that comes with keeping them running is close to non-discretionary for the customer.
What It Means for Makers
None of this touches the desktop or prosumer end of the market directly — Stratasys plays almost entirely in industrial and enterprise polymer and composite systems, not the FDM or resin printers most hobbyists have on a bench. But the results are still a useful data point for anyone tracking where the money in additive manufacturing is actually flowing. Defense and aerospace sustainment work, not consumer or prototyping demand, is where a legacy industrial vendor is finding its clearest growth right now, and materials/consumables revenue — the same subscription-like economics that print-farm operators and service bureaus rely on — is outperforming hardware sales even at the enterprise scale. If you're evaluating industrial-grade equipment for a shop, or watching for signals about where vendor R&D dollars will get pointed next, defense-qualified materials and sustainment-friendly workflows look like the safer bet over the next few quarters.
A More Cautious Full-Year Outlook
Stratasys held its full-year 2026 guidance steady at $565 million to $575 million in revenue and $25 million to $30 million in adjusted EBITDA, per 3DPrint.com's reporting — so management isn't signaling a change in its overall growth trajectory for the year. But the company did walk back one piece of guidance: it no longer expects positive full-year operating cash flow, a notable downgrade from prior expectations. Stratasys used $18.7 million in operating cash during the second quarter alone, according to 3DPrint.com's reporting, though management indicated it expects cash flow to turn positive in the second half of the year. Investors will likely be watching the next quarter's cash flow statement closely regardless, particularly given the pending MarkForged acquisition and the working-capital demands that come with ramping government contract fulfillment.
The combination — flat revenue, record consumables, growing defense exposure, and a softer cash flow picture — paints a company mid-pivot: increasingly reliant on government sustainment contracts and recurring materials revenue to offset a hardware sales environment that hasn't meaningfully reaccelerated. Whether that pivot pays off will depend heavily on how the MarkForged integration lands and whether the Air Force relationship scales into the kind of multi-year program Stratasys will need to keep defense growth at double-digit rates.
