The two companies producing sand 3D printers are now unified.

ExOne and voxeljet are being merged together in a not-too-surprising announcement from ExOne Global Holdings. Who are they? They are a company set up by Anzu Partners, the investment firm that scooped up some of the stray assets following the Desktop Metal corporate debacle earlier this year.

Nano Dimension’s new management found themselves holding a number of corporate assets after the unwanted acquisition of Desktop Metal. Seeing as they didn’t believe these assets would provide benefit to the company, they sold several of them other investors, and ExOne ended up with Anzu Partners.

Previously, Anzu Partners had acquired voxeljet for the paltry sum of €1.7M (US$2M).

Rudolf Franz, Whitney Haring-Smith and Eric Bader in front of the ExOne building [Source: ExOne]

Both companies offer, among other products, sand 3D printers. These are large scale systems capable of printing sand molds that are typically used for metal casting. I’m not sure there are any other notable producers of sand 3D printers, so it may be that Anzu Partners has cornered the market in this niche. That said, it’s a small niche — both ExOne and voxeljet were not growing operations.

We investigated Anzu Partners in August, as they are a new player in the 3D print universe that few know about. Over the past couple of year they have been accumulating several 3D print-related operations, including not only these two companies but also 6K and EnvisionTEC.

There’s something to understand about mergers and acquisitions of this type. A buyer cannot simply buy more companies and leave them as is. Typically the companies purchased are not in good shape — that’s why they were for sale. If left as is, they would continue to be poorly performing.

A buyer should reorganize the work under their portfolio to optimize activity and, hopefully, generate profits. This is usually done by identifying synergies that allow for elimination of some work. For example, we’ve mentioned five operations so far: voxeljet, 6K, EnvisionTEC, ExOne, and ExOne Global Holdings. If operating independently each would have a CEO, CFO, COO and other administrative positions.

In a combined operation as Anzu Partners seems to be pursuing, at least several of these positions would not be required: why have five CFOs when you could have one do the work? It is obviously a bad outcome for the individuals affected, but on the other hand the entire company would go down otherwise.

What we’re seeing this week with the combining of voxeljet and ExOne is part of that optimization. This is a good sign for the future, as it seems Anzu Partners knows how to handle acquisitions.