Additionally, the design freedom that they offer together with the constantly growing range of available materials have broadened their appeal, especially for producing products with highly complex geometry that meet the requirements of various applications and industries [5]. Therefore, it is not surprising that lately, these technologies have been widely considered as promising and as increasingly viable manufacturing options in many industrial sectors, e.g., by manufacturers in aerospace, tooling, energy, automotive, and medical sectors. Respectively, this has increased the need for process development and optimisation and thus, to overcome the limitations of metal AM technologies and meet the specific requirements of their diverse application areas. In particular, defects occurring during the builds, e.g., gas entrapment and unfused powder, were investigated which led to inconsistencies of components' mechanical properties and had detrimental effects on their fatigue performance in fracture critical applications [6]. Investigations focused on eliminating and/or minimising process shortcomings associated with the layer wise build principles, such as poor surface integrity and mechanical performance, lower manufacturing throughout and higher processing time, have also been reported [7; 8; 9]. Furthermore, it was reported that post treatments, such as heat treatment, hot isostatic pressing (HIP) and surface finishing of as-built components could improve their relatively poor surface integrity to meet the technical requirements in many applications [10; 11; 12; 13]. Nevertheless, the batch AM production is still in its infancy and one of the main reasons for this is that it is commonly necessary to post-process metal AM components to meet industry requirements in most application areas. Consequently, the metal AM technology has a relatively narrow application window when compared with conventional processes, in regards to achievable throughputs, unit cost, geometrical accuracy, and component's quality. Therefore, attempts to combine its capabilities with those of primary processes with higher production rates, such as metal injection moulding (MIM), gravity and die casting, have been reported recently and thus to selectively allow partial customisation and/or personalised hybrid components with partial production with time and cost saving bulk processes in various configurations for their envisaged applications [14; 15; 16]. Such hybrid components manufacture (HCM) requires specialised tooling solutions to implement it in production lines, and thus to integrate metal AM with other complementary processes for producing small to medium batches cost-effectively. Currently, the research on the HCM route is mostly focused on developing the necessary tooling and software solutions [17; 18]. Some pilot HCM implementations for producing a small series of hybrid components have been reported where standardised minimum requirements have been met [19]. However, some further post-processing, i.e., heat treatment (HT), was required as some embrittlement at the MIM/laser-based powder bed fusion (L-PBF) joints was observed [19]. This was attributed to some residual stress concentration but a methodology and/or study to overcome the stated shortcomings were not provided. Additional studies report incremental manufacturing, which are mainly theoretical without an experimental work and evaluation, focused only on process development [20; 21; 22]. HCM solutions were investigated by other researchers as well. However, without discussing their potential for serial manufacture and moreover, without a proper investigation of necessary tooling and software for implementing them in a pilot production line [23; 24]. Furthermore, repeatability and microstructural consistency of produced hybrid components were not investigated and their surface integrity and mechanical performance were not optimised.