Which 3D print company is the biggest? [Image by Stefan Keller from Pixabay]
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.
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 first take a look at the major 3D printing companies on this week’s list. I consider these companies “major” because their market valuations are significantly larger than others in the space.
Major Players
| RANK | COMPANY | CAP | CHG |
| 1 | 3D Systems | 3493 | -282 |
| 2 | Xometry | 2807 | -271 |
| 3 | Protolabs | 1947 | -246 |
| 4 | Desktop Metal | 1913 | -375 |
| 5 | Markforged | 1476 | -270 |
| 6 | Nano Dimension | 1403 | -35 |
| 7 | Stratasys | 1291 | -112 |
| 8 | Materialise | 1178 | -51 |
| 9 | ExOne | 507 | -32 |
| 10 | SLM Solutions | 441 | -28 |
| TOTAL | 16457 | -1701 |
This week saw rather large decreases in market value across the board, and a slight switch in rankings.
In general, the trend was downward for all tradable 3D printing companies. In fact, our leaderboard of major players lost an astonishing US$1.7B in value this week!
No company was immune to this effect, with companies dropping between 2-16 percent of their previous week’s value.
The “winner”, if you could call it that, would be Nano Dimension, whose value dropped only 2.4%. Meanwhile, the “loser” would be Desktop Metal, whose value dropped 16.4% week over week.
In fact, Desktop Metal’s drop was sufficient to slot them in one ranking lower, at position four. Leapfrogging them was Protolabs, whose quarterly report indicated they outperformed expectations on their quarterly revenue, likely helping maintain their stock price.
Meanwhile, Desktop Metal is likely still suffering from the effects of their proposed acquisition of ExOne. The deal involved swapping stock with ExOne, but also providing ExOne shareholders with cash. That cash directly comes out of Desktop Metal’s value, so a corresponding drop in stock price & market capitalization was inevitable. This week saw more of the same, but the company’s stock will likely stabilize after the market has absorbed the deal.
Another company with a significant drop this week was newcomer Markforged, who just became tradable only recently. It’s likely their stock price is volatile because it’s new to the market and has yet to find a stable level, so this is unsurprising.
ExOne still appears on our leaderboard, and will do so until they are officially absorbed by Desktop Metal.
Other Players
| RANK | COMPANY | CAP | CHG |
| 11 | MeaTech | 80 | -2 |
| 12 | voxeljet | 50 | -10 |
| 13 | ARC Group WW | 25 | -4 |
| 14 | AML3D | 20 | 0 |
| 15 | Aurora Labs | 11 | -1 |
| 16 | Tinkerine | 3 | 0 |
| TOTAL |
The lesser valued companies tend to have much smaller shifts in their market capitalization because there is far less trading occurring on their stocks. The big money tends to hover around the larger players.
This week saw drops in value of a similar magnitude to the larger players list. voxeljet, ARC Group WW and Aurora Labs all saw decreases in value exceeding ten percent. Leader MeaTech stayed flat, likely because their market (food) is entirely different from that of the other players (manufacturing).
The similarity of these valuation drops among all companies demonstrates the herd mentality of investors. If there is good news from one company, it tends to pull up all others.
Or down, as apparently was the case this week.
Note that we are unable to obtain Massivit’s market cap value, as it does not seem to be published, even though they are a publicly traded company on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange.
Upcoming Changes
We’re still standing by to see the debut of two more companies, Shapeways and VELO3D, both of which could end up on our Major Players leaderboard.
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 now exactly what it is at any moment. The suspected bigger companies include EOS, Carbon, Formlabs and SLM Solutions.
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.
