3000% increase in sales might justify (sort of) the increasing delivery delays in terms of printers and spares, although, BL could very well have foreseen from the Q1-2023 the increase of demand, as stats definitely would have pointed out and should have taken the necessary steps to secure that it had what was (still is) needed to cover the demand, without forgetting to boost the customer support staff (as number and adequate training). Sadly, despite all the clear signals received from the market, BL’s management failed (again) to acknowledge the facts and adapt to the situation. Thing is, their major competitors, once shaken from their "don’t
fix it if it works " lethargy, have (finally) woken up and they are catching up fast, even if that means that several of them are (arguably and shamelessly) copying - or “borrowing” - from the BL’s successful flagship, the X1C.
That presumes that scaling up a business means you just decide to do so, hire some staff and rent more office space. I think growing fast is one the biggest challenges for any company.
3000%? No company management would scale their production by this level based on the belief that business would expand this much. If they guess wrong, it’ll ruin the company. No company would expand by half that, or probably even 1/10th of that. They’ll sell everything they make if the market really is growing that fast, though maybe not everything they could have sold, and then crank production up a little more. Lather, rinse, repeat. No significant downside risk.
Not to mention the suppliers of the parts that go in to the printer. They’d have to spend money and take risk to ramp their production, too. Adding time to BBL’s ability to ramp.
And lead times for the commoditized parts can be long.
Doubling production volume is probably a year-long effort.
That’s what the quoted article is claiming (see screenshot below). Whether this claim is true or not, remains to be proven from at least 2 other independent sources. Nevertheless, it is a more than impressive growth in demand.
If you only sold 1 in 2022, and you sold 3000 in 2023, that’d be 3000% shipment increase. Explosive growth expressed as a percentage isn’t necessarily the same thing as shipping a lot of machines. Really need the actual count of machines to judge.
Also it states it’s a 3000% increase in shipments, I would assume this includes machines, filament, accessories, etc. and not just machines. Either way, nice problem to have for a business - but still a problem.
Actually, 3000% is x30 not x3000…
lol… the point of contention here is the fact that despite having such a dramatic (shipment) growth, of which BL was fully aware since Q1 last year, they haven’t been able to cope with both the high demand nor to ensure the adequate level of customer support.
Good point. “Duh” on me. And I’m a math guy. 