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 | Xometry | 1,394 | -153 |
| 2 | 3D Systems | 1,309 | -155 |
| 3 | Stratasys | 871 | -50 |
| 4 | Protolabs | 833 | -77 |
| 5 | Nano Dimension | 728 | -15 |
| 6 | Velo3D | 580 | -58 |
| 7 | SLM Solutions | 538 | -5 |
| 8 | Materialise | 513 | -24 |
| 9 | Desktop Metal | 473 | -92 |
| 10 | Markforged | 256 | -10 |
| 11 | FATHOM | 163 | +9 |
| 12 | Steakholder Foods | 45 | 0 |
| 13 | Massivit | 39 | -4 |
| 14 | Freemelt | 31 | +8 |
| 15 | Shapeways | 24 | -7 |
| 16 | voxeljet | 23 | +1 |
| 17 | Titomic | 21 | -2 |
| 18 | Sygnis | 12 | +0 |
| 19 | AML3D | 11 | +0 |
| 20 | Sigma Additive Solutions | 11 | 0 |
| 21 | Aurora Labs | 5 | +1 |
| 22 | Tinkerine | 1 | -0 |
| TOTAL | 7,880 | -631 |
This week saw disastrous drops in valuation for most companies on the leaderboard. Overall, the leaderboard fell about seven and a half percent, which is big — 14 weeks of that and the total would be zero!
Much of the negative changes were derived from the overall state of the market, which dropped 2-3% depending on which exchange you’re looking at. Being in a poorly-understood technology space, the companies on the leaderboard tend to suffer (or benefit) from market shifts in dramatic ways. This week was no different.
Hidden among the general valuation drops was one significant rise. Sweden’s Freemelt’s valuation rose an incredible 35% this week. Given the market conditions, this is equivalent to a 42% jump in value. What caused the huge shift?
It turns out that Freemelt announced a number of items this week, one of which was the opening of business in the USA, and the hiring of an experienced AM executive to take control of it.
But I don’t believe that was the major driver for Freemelt’s jump. Instead it was the fact that they company decided to issue a number of new shares to raise cash from investors. They reported they’d raised SKE 66M (US$6.3M) from eager investors, thereby raising the valuation of the company accordingly.
In addition, they said the cash injection will be used to further development of their unusual LPBF systems and increase their marketing & sales presence.
Evidently public investors saw this as positive news, and the company’s stock price shot skyward.
Meanwhile, the rest of the leaderboard had a pretty disastrous week, valuation-wise.
Desktop Metal dropped over 16% this week. The company had no particular announcements to drive this result, aside from a new dental device — and an announcement that they will be soon releasing their 2022 financial results. That may have provoked investors to take a look at the company’s prospects and evidently some investors are selling before the results are published.
Shapeways dropped almost 23% in value this week, with no official announcements from the company since early December. They’ve been very quiet, and it is puzzling to see their valuation drop so precipitously in just one week. However, if one looks at the long term pattern of the company’s stock price, one can see that the drop is likely just a continuation of a gradual decrease in value that’s been underway for the past year.
Most other companies on the leaderboard dropped between two to ten percent this week, and I’m sure no one is happy. Other than Freemelt investors, that is.
Upcoming Changes
A company set to appear was Essentium, who announced plans to use a SPAC-merger to launch on NASDAQ. However, that deal has been suspended so we’re wondering what the company’s next steps might be.
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.
