Which 3D Printing Company Is The Biggest?

This has been a question of mine for some time, so I decided to investigate using science.

There are many ways to define the “biggest” company. It might be the company that sells the highest number of devices. But that wouldn’t be fair to 3D print service companies, which don’t sell machines at all. This is also nearly impossible to measure because most companies don’t often release the number of machines sold, and never on a regular basis.

It could be the company with the most revenue, but that could be misleading if they are not profitable.

In the end I decided to use “market capitalization”. This is the value obtained when you add up the cost of every share of a company using the current share price from the stock market. “Market Cap” is a frequently used measuring stick for determining the size of a company. Sometimes it’s called a “Valuation”, particularly for privately-held companies.

But, yes, there is again another problem. While we can relatively easily determine the market cap for publicly-traded companies, we cannot know the valuation of privately-held companies because, well, they are private. However, with the growing crowd of major players going public, the number of privately-held companies is shrinking, and only a small handful of them could rival the size of the publicly-traded companies.

Sigh, and I’m afraid there’s yet another problem: some companies, like HP or Siemens, are extremely large, and only a tiny sliver of their operations is involved in 3D printing. In some cases, the 3D print activity is single percents of their business. This means it’s unfair to compare them directly with companies dedicated to the technology. To solve this dilemma, I simply put them in another category.

As of this writing, this is the “Top Seven” list of 3D print-related companies. These are by far and away the largest publicly-traded companies dedicated to 3D print technologies:

RANK	COMPANY	MARKET CAP (US$M)
1	Desktop Metal	5,129
2	3D Systems	3,362
3	Protolabs	3,432
4	Nano Dimension	2,488
5	Materialise	2,207
6	Stratasys	1,756
7	ExOne	728

Those above are all major players, but there are a few more that have significantly smaller market caps:

RANK	COMPANY	MARKET CAP (US$M)
1	voxeljet	87
2	ARC Group WW	22
3	Aurora Labs	15
4	Tinkerine	4
5	Robo	2
?	Massivit	Market Cap not available

I know of two companies that apparently are soon to join the ranks of publicly-traded 3D print companies: Markforged and VELO3D. When they appear, they’ll go on our list.

Here is the current list of major 3D print players that are mostly involved in other lines of business:

RANK	COMPANY	MARKET CAP (US$M)
1	Siemens	115,736
2	GE	114,553
3	Autodesk	58,899
4	Dassault Systèmes	56,870
5	HP	38,165
6	ANSYS	28,174
7	PTC	15,390
8	Kinpo / XYZprinting	15,056
9	Renishaw	6,031
10	XEROX	3,823
11	Groupe Gorge	353
12	Sindoh	273
13	Sigma Labs	37
14	Thermwood	11
15	Ricoh	Market Cap not available

Finally, here is our list of privately-held 3D print companies. I’ve put an asterisk* beside the companies that I would not be surprised would go public at some point in the near future. Note that I don’t know anything specific, but given their place in the market it would make sense for them to do so:

Additive Industries*

BCN3D

BigRep*

Carbon*

Creality

EOS

Essentium*

Farsoon

Flashforge

Formlabs*

INTAMSYS

Lithoz

FAME 3D / LulzBot

MakerBot (part of Stratasys)

Markforged*

Photocentric

Prusa Research

Raise3D

SLM Solutions*

Trumpf*

Ultimaker*

UnionTech

VELO3D*

XJet*

Did I forget a company? No doubt, as there are literally hundreds of 3D print companies, but many are quite small and would not position in the top ranks in any case. Please let me know if you have any additions or corrections and I can see about including them in the next update.

The rankings do change from time to time, as stock prices rise and fall, sometimes dramatically. For example, when you read this report it will automatically be out of date, bit still representative of the situation. When changes do occur in stock prices, changes in the market cap rankings change as well. There will also be new introductions to the lists when companies go public, or removals when a company is acquired.

I will post updates to our list on a regular basis, and next week I’ll take a look at some of the most interesting findings from the list.