On February 14, 2024, the White House hosted a meeting of small business leaders, industry association experts, investors, and federal officials to discuss the Biden-Harris Administration's Small Business Investment Corporation (SBIC) A roundtable discussion on reform was held. program.
According to the Small Business Administration (SBA), “SBICs are privately owned businesses that are chartered and regulated by the SBA…The SBA does not invest directly in small businesses, but it invests funds in qualified SBICs with expertise in specific areas. or industry. Those SBICs use private placement funds, along with SBA-guaranteed funds, to invest in small and medium-sized businesses. ”
One of the key developments revealed at the event was the SBA's announcement that it has approved investment bank Stifel North Atlantic to begin raising private financing for the Additive Manufacturing (AM) Forward SBIC Fund. That's what I did. The AM Forward Fund is part of the SBA-DOD SBIC Critical Technologies (SBICCT) initiative, announced in September 2023 as the first program of the Department of Defense and SBA partnership launched in December 2022.
SBICCT is jointly managed by the Department of Defense's Office of Strategic Capital (OSC) and SBA's Office of Investment and Innovation (OII) and is designed to expand private sector investment in component-level technologies and production processes deemed critical. “The purpose is that. To the national security of the United States. According to the White House, with the AM Forward Fund, “Stifel North Atlantic aims to advance progress for millions of people.” [AM] Aiming to increase advanced manufacturing capabilities in the domestic supply chain, it will strengthen production capabilities such as employee training, part design, machining and inspection, and parts qualification. ”
The stage is set for this development in August 2023, when two members of AM Forward, Lockheed Martin and GE, along with Stifel Financial and the non-profit Applied Science and Technology Research Organization (ASTRO) of America, will join the Deputy Secretary of Defense. It was announced that a meeting had been held with Kathleen Hicks of the Department of Defense and Isabella Casillas Guzman, SBA Administrator. The topic of that meeting was the possibility of a Small Business Investment Fund (SBIF) to support AM Forward, among other things.
Now that the AM Forward Fund is a reality, progress toward achieving the goals of the Compact, which includes a number of target ranges, including the percentage of printed components sourced from small and medium-sized U.S. businesses, will likely accelerate. At the same time, perhaps it will be even more interesting to see if the target parameters adapt to the changes in the landscape over the past few years.
AM Forward has been around for less than two years, but two years in the 2020s is, of course, an eternity. Supply chains remain more disrupted than ever before, but the sources of that disruption are changing. Additionally, the government has issued countless policy statements over this period regarding the types of macro supply chain issues that AM Forward was also established to address.
Finally, I will be watching closely to see how this development ties in with potential progress toward restoring manufacturing R&D tax incentives. There are many unknowns, and the overall uncertainty surrounding the economics of the AM industry and manufacturing as a whole is spiraling. But whatever else may be the case, it is certain that the US federal government is not slowing down its support for AM.
