There are numerous metrics you should utilize, whether or not quantitative or qualitative, to evaluate the success of a corporation. Some of the essential might merely be the group’s means to set a transparent agenda for itself and successfully exhibit that it will possibly observe by way of.
In accordance with these parameters, Nikon Superior Manufacturing has been having fairly a profitable 12 months. Furthermore, the success the corporate has achieved to this point in 2025 is the type that appears to be organising Nikon Superior Manufacturing for even greater issues within the not-too-distant future.
I feel Nikon is the type of enterprise that everybody within the additive manufacturing (AM) business ought to control, given the legacy of the father or mother company, the AM enterprise unit’s collection of key acquisitions over the previous couple of years, and its ties to a few of the world’s most vital adopters of metallic AM. From a private standpoint, I’m particularly serious about watching the story of Nikon Superior Manufacturing unfold as a result of the interview I did final fall with the corporate’s CEO, Hamid Zarringhalam, was one of the crucial instructive conversations I’ve had concerning the AM business.
In that interview, Zarringhalam laid out the corporate’s multi-year roadmap for constructing connections to essentially the most strategically essential sectors, primarily centered on concentrating on the U.S. protection market. Within the first half of 2025, Nikon Superior Manufacturing has already made a collection of key strides in direction of carrying out that goal. The corporate’s progress on that entrance features a deal between Nikon SLM Options, ATI, and Bechtel Plant Equipment Inc., to print hypersonic components for the U.S. Navy; a contract from America Makes to develop an aluminum alloy dataset for aerospace and protection functions; and a strategic partnership with ASTM Worldwide to develop functions and have interaction in workforce growth in help of the U.S. protection industrial base (DIB).
A Nikon Superior Manufacturing engineer showcases 3D printed components and AMnation powder in collaboration with America Makes.
On the finish of June, lower than a 12 months after our final dialog, I spoke with Zarringhalam once more to find out how the CEO is feeling amid what seems to be extraordinarily optimistic momentum for Nikon Superior Manufacturing’s long-term implementation of its metallic AM-centric marketing strategy. Zarringhalam clearly is aware of that the corporate is shifting in the appropriate course, whereas additionally emphasizing that it’s simply began to put the groundwork for what it’s in the end able to:
“I’m actually happy concerning the progress we’ve made,” Zarringhalam affirmed, “and it hasn’t been simple. Coming from the semiconductor house, that’s the pace and wavelength I function on, so at occasions, metallic AM has felt sluggish to me. There’s far more to come back — and there are additionally different issues that we’ve completed for the protection market that we haven’t introduced but.
“By way of what we’ve already achieved, I’m very enthusiastic about this America Makes proposal. If you take our gear functionality with Nikon SLM Options, which allows high-productivity output on large-format machines, and mix that with our manufacturing and engineering providers arm at our facility in Lengthy Seashore, I feel we’ve created a compelling blueprint for scaling the U.S. DIB’s vital future capabilities on home shores.”
By partnering with powder provider Constellium and a handful of different collaborators to qualify Constellium’s CP1 aluminum alloy powder for protection functions, Nikon Superior Manufacturing has launched into a undertaking that may show the corporate’s means to maximise concord between all of its varied parts:
“There’s quite a lot of curiosity in CP1, a high-strength aluminum alloy, from protection and aerospace producers, in addition to producers for the house business. In an effort to meet that demand, the alloy must be certified on large-format, high-productivity machines,” Zarringhalam defined. “The NXG XII 600 Sequence aren’t simply R&D machines: there are round 50 of them within the subject already, producing end-use components. 80 p.c of these techniques are working as a fleet collectively, so there are a lot of repeat buys.
“Getting CP1 certified on the NXG XII 600 offers the powder an excellent alternative to be utilized at scale by skilled end-users. It wasn’t a small funding for us, to place ourselves within the place to have the ability to safe the contract. Along with dedicating a machine solely to this one alloy, and the manpower required to function the system at our facility, we additionally wanted help letters from all of our companions on the contract.
“That illustrates how dedicated we’re to serving to the DIB to scale rising capabilities within the U.S., and I feel it’s a basic instance of profitable industrial coverage in motion, working to create a standard manufacturing ecosystem.”
Nikon Superior Manufacturing CEO Hamid Zarringhalam and Andy Kireta, President of ASTM Worldwide, shake fingers. Picture courtesy of Nikon
Certainly one of Nikon’s companions on the America Makes contract is ASTM Worldwide, bringing collectively two enterprises with greater than two centuries of mixed expertise in standardizing essentially the most superior manufacturing processes throughout any given period of their respective existences. The strategic partnership established by Nikon and ASTM, separate from the America Makes contract, will profit from entry to the assets, infrastructure, and personnel on the Nikon AM Know-how Middle in Lengthy Seashore.
Nikon, in flip, will profit from ASTM’s means to certify new staff in powder mattress fusion (PBF) processes, notably in relation to ASTM’s know-how in leveraging metallic AM for maritime functions:
“ASTM clearly brings worth when it comes to their experience at standardization, which is a prerequisite to have the ability to scale successfully. You additionally want to have the ability to develop the workforce so as to standardize and scale, and that’s one other factor that ASTM does effectively,” Zarringhalam mentioned. “Now, we have now this facility in Lengthy Seashore that won’t solely qualify supplies, and provide engineering providers, but additionally prepare the machine operators wanted so as to produce the components wanted by the protection sector. The power is changing into greater than only a single manufacturing website, it’s rising into a completely built-in hub that may develop and execute industrial technique.
“On the protection in addition to the business facet, the maritime sector proper now — for each the U.S. and its allies — must drastically speed up manufacturing capability to ensure that all of the related nations to satisfy their manufacturing objectives. Not too long ago, the U.Ok. introduced a serious protection spending enhance, and a serious side of that enhance concerned shipbuilding. Australia is within the strategy of getting ready to construct the primary AUKUS-class submarines.
“The work that goes into fulfilling all of those targets might be pulling from the identical provide chain. If we give you an answer within the U.S. that serves the maritime sector usually, and the submarine industrial base, particularly, I feel the perfect final result for everybody can be to plot options that may be replicated as simply as doable, in any allied locality the place the manufacturing in the end takes place.”
Nikon AM Know-how Middle.
That’s exactly why the maritime industrial base within the U.S. and its allied and companion nations wants — broadly — extra superior manufacturing capability, extra metallic AM capability, particularly, and, above all, why the West’s maritime industrial base must speed up the involvement of corporations like Nikon Superior Manufacturing, which occupy the perfect floor for unlocking the potential of collaborations between the oldest primes and the most recent startups.
Alongside these strains, Zarringhalam’s many years of expertise within the semiconductor capital gear enterprise give the CEO an ideal vantage level for approaching the kinds of modifications that the metallic AM market may also help the U.S. DIB implement. Distributed manufacturing enabled by AM presents a brand new perspective on the idea, however Zarringhalam’s imaginative and prescient for what Nikon Superior Manufacturing can convey to the maritime sector and the protection sector at massive is within the mildew of fabless manufacturing. That is the enterprise mannequin within the semiconductor business whereby a small variety of corporations design and market chips which might be produced by third-party foundries.
On the Lengthy Seashore State of the Metropolis 2025 handle, Mayor Rex Richardson invited Nikon Superior Manufacturing CEO Hamid Zarringhalam on stage.
Whereas that is the norm right now, it was remarkable till the late Eighties, a shift that shows how rapidly the semiconductor business can reorganize itself. There’s nothing that claims the underlying philosophy can’t be utilized to different verticals:
“We’re advocating for an industrial technique that may result in high-scale, high-volume output with metallic AM,” asserted Zarringhalam. “A technique to try this, probably, can be to design the product in a single location, perhaps even do low-volume preliminary manufacturing, after which principally switch that course of over to an AM farm elsewhere.
“This could require a joint technique between the federal government and personal business, and the investments would should be made by and between resilient corporations. Spreading the work to corporations whose survival isn’t assured isn’t a possible choice, on this context.
“That’s one other lesson from semiconductor manufacturing. I keep in mind sitting in buyer conferences, discussing expertise roadmaps on a ten-year forward-facing timeline, and the method is at all times to some extent a guess on emergent applied sciences. That course of doesn’t work until each the producers and the suppliers have a confirmed monitor document of resilience over the lengthy haul.”
Echoing our final dialog, Zarringhalam concluded by making an apt comparability between the present international industrial context and that of the Chilly Struggle:
“I’ll be glad after I see superior manufacturing built-in in a manner that units up the way forward for U.S. business to succeed, particularly in relation to the DIB. I don’t essentially wish to say we have to revitalize the DIB, as a result of I feel protection manufacturing within the U.S. continues to be fairly sturdy.
“However the gaps which might be there are the kinds of issues that should be solved by superior manufacturing processes and superior applied sciences like metallic AM, and one thing we will be optimistic about, right here, is that we’ve completed this earlier than. 50 or 60 years in the past, we began down an analogous path, and that effort gained the Chilly Struggle. Folks within the positions to make a distinction realized what wanted to be completed, they overcame present deficiencies and limitations, they usually did it by implementing and bringing to scale essentially the most superior manufacturing applied sciences obtainable on the time.
“If we are able to play any small half in carrying out that very same type of mission within the twenty first century, I’ll be very pleased with what we’ve completed.”
Pictures courtesy of Nikon Superior Manufacturing
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