Once again we take a look at the valuations of the major 3D printing companies over the past week.
Publicly traded companies are required to post their financial reports, as well as appear on stock markets. From there we can calculate the total value of their company by multiplying the current stock price by the number of outstanding shares. This number is the market capitalization, and represents the current valuation of the company.
It’s a great number of compare companies, as the market capitalization can be leveraged to provide more capabilities for the company. Shares could, for example, be used as collateral for a loan. That and similar maneuvers could generate cash with which the company might undertake new projects.
In other words, “market cap”, as it is known, is quite important.
You might think it’s not important to monitor these companies each week, as their value is realized only when stocks are sold. However, events happen to companies occasionally that cause their value to rise and fall, and this weekly post is where we track such things.
Note that our list here does not include all major 3D print companies. Not all 3D print companies are publicly traded, and thus we cannot officially know their true size, such as EOS. Others, like HP or Siemens, have very large 3D printing divisions, but are part a much larger enterprises and we cannot know the true size of their 3D printing activities.
Let’s take a look at the 3D printing companies on this week’s list.
3D Printing Leaderboard
| RANK | COMPANY | CAP | CHG |
| 1 | Protolabs | 777 | +2 |
| 2 | Stratasys | 618 | +32 |
| 3 | Xometry | 554 | +15 |
| 4 | Nano Dimension | 542 | +60 |
| 5 | 3D Systems | 427 | +5 |
| 6 | Materialise | 284 | -+4 |
| 7 | Desktop Metal | 166 | +36 |
| 8 | Markforged | 90 | +7 |
| 9 | Titomic | 84 | +33 |
| 10 | Velo3D | 55 | +32 |
| 11 | AML3D | 27 | +2 |
| 12 | Massivit | 19 | +3 |
| 13 | Aurora Labs | 16 | -+1 |
| 14 | Steakholder Foods | 12 | +3 |
| 15 | Freemelt | 10 | +0 |
| 16 | Shapeways | 4 | +0 |
| 17 | Sygnis | 1 | -+4 |
| TOTAL | 0 | +0 | |
| 3686 | +223 |
This week saw few changes at the top of the leaderboard, but wild changes lower down.
The overall markets this week were up 1-3%, with more emphasis on tech stocks, of which the 3D print leaderboard entries belong. The leaderboard rose a whopping 6.43%, perhaps the highest weekly bump ever. Some of that jump was the market overall influence, but a lot dealt with specific happenings in the industry.
The biggest news of the week was the announcement that Nano Dimension was fully acquiring Desktop Metal. Nano Dimension, flush with a large cash reserve, has been on the hunt for a major acquisition for over a year. Their primary target was the larger Stratasys, but in spite of seemingly countless offers, all ended up rejected and Nano Dimension had to look elsewhere.
Desktop Metal had been on an acquisition tear of its own, but eventually ran short of cash and wasn’t able to generate sufficient revenues. They sought a merger with Stratasys earlier this year, but that was rejected by Stratasys shareholders. Since then Desktop Metal sought a new strategy, and it seems that it ended up being bought by Nano Dimension.
Nano Dimension offered Desktop Metal shareholders a premium over their current trading price, so this obviously affected this week’s valuations. Note, however, that the deal HAS NOT CLOSED, and the two operate as separate companies until the deal is finalized. However, investors anticipate what will happen and adjust their valuations accordingly in the interim.
Nano Dimension’s valuation rose by twelve percent this week, after the deal. That may seem significant over the week, but in the longer term it isn’t really much of a change, as you can see in this wider chart:
Desktop Metal rose by 28%, about par with the premium offered by Nano Dimension, so that makes sense. Curiously, the value of Desktop Metal prior to the offer was about US$130M, and the price to be paid is US$183M. This suggests that Nano Dimension investors believe there is value in the combined companies.
The other big bit of news this week was that Shapeways finally decided to fold, as they declared bankruptcy. The company, once valued at an incredible US%600M+, is now worth US%1M. The valuation crashed after the announcement, as you can see above. The company is still legally operating, but under the control of bankruptcy administrators. This is the final week that Shapeways will appear on the leaderboard.
Elsewhere there seems to be something happening with Australian metal 3D printing companies, as three of them gained significantly this week.
Titomic rose a whopping 64%, most likely on news they made a significant sale to a US-based innovation center. The deal not only provides Titomic with US$1.2M in revenue, but also establishes a US site where potential customers can see demonstrations of their technology.
AML3D rose an incredible 142% on news they’ve made a sale of a system to a US Navy component supplier. The news also hints that the supplier is leaning towards purchasing additional systems, which would be a huge deal for AML3D.
Finally, we have Aurora Labs, which rose almost 18%. Aurora Labs announced a memorandum of understanding with an AI company that produces digital twins of micro gas turbines. I think the idea here is that by understanding the performance an operation of these turbines could allow Aurora Labs to produce outstanding turbine parts — and thus open up a whole new application for their metal 3D printing technology.
It may also be that investors saw the combination of good news from each of the three as a positive signal for the Australian metal 3D printing business, boosting all of the above.
Upcoming Changes
BigRep announced plans to go public via the SPAC approach, so we will soon see them appear on the leaderboard.
One company I’ve started to watch is ICON, the Texas-based construction 3D printer manufacturer. This privately-held company has been raising a significant amount of investment to the tune of almost half a billion dollars. At that level it is likely they will be discussing a transition to public markets at some point, which would certainly place them at or near the top of our leaderboard.
Another company that would seem logical to go public is VulcanForms, a manufacturing service using an advanced metal 3D printing process. They are currently privately valued at over US$1B, and going public could cause that to go even higher.
If you are aware of any other publicly-traded 3D print companies that should be on our leaderboard, please let us know!
Others In The Industry
While we’ve been following the public companies, don’t forget there are a number of private companies that don’t appear on any stock exchange. These privately-held companies likely have significant value, it’s just that we can’t know exactly what it is at any moment. The suspected bigger companies include EOS, Carbon and Formlabs.
Perhaps someday some of them will appear on our major players list.
Related Companies
Finally, there are a number of companies that are deeply engaged in the 3D print industry, but that activity is only a small slice of their operations. Thus it’s not fair to place them on the lists above because we don’t really know where their true 3D print activities lie.
