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 | Bright Laser | $2,022 | +303 |
| 2 | Farsoon | $1,186 | +170 |
| 3 | Xometry | $857 | -69 |
| 4 | Protolabs | $722 | -18 |
| 5 | Stratasys | $556 | -23 |
| 6 | Nano Dimension | $545 | -15 |
| 7 | 3D Systems | $382 | -4 |
| 8 | Materialise | $304 | -12 |
| 9 | Desktop Metal | $162 | +6 |
| 10 | Markforged | $96 | -1 |
| 11 | Titomic | $81 | -8 |
| 12 | AML3D | $47 | +10 |
| 13 | BigRep | $37 | -24 |
| 14 | Aurora Labs | $18 | -0 |
| 15 | Freemelt | $10 | +3 |
| 16 | Massivit | $9 | -0 |
| 17 | Steakholder Foods | $8 | +1 |
| 18 | Velo3D | $7 | +2 |
| 19 | Sygnis | $4 | -0 |
| TOTAL | $7,053 | +319 |
This week saw a number of risers and fallers on the leaderboard, with global effects mixing things up significantly.
At the top of the leaderboard we have Bright Laser and Farsoon, two publicly traded Chinese AM companies that we recently added. Both companies had very significant valuation growth this week, around 17% each. This was quite different from Western companies, that were mostly flat.
Was there something these companies did to justify this boost? It seems that the Chinese markets have all grown dramatically in the past few days. It’s theorized that the gains in those markets are based on government polices regarding the real estate market, on which much of the Chinese economy relies. It’s likely that these two AM companies were swept up in the overall market gains. These two companies now represent around 45% of the total valuation of the publicly traded 3D print companies.
AML3D gained a huge 26% in valuation this week. While there were no official announcements from the company, it’s likely that this lightly-traded stock’s recently issued positive financials are being discovered by investors. The relatively small size of the stock allows for big shifts, and that’s what we’re seeing this week.
Desktop Metal gained four percent, and that’s likely due to the recent acquisition offer from Nano Dimension. The offer was for US$115M cash for the entire company, and that’s why we see Desktop Metal’s valuation converging on something close to US$100M. It isn’t going to US$115M because of the slight uncertainty of the deal closing.
BigRep, a newcomer to the stock markets, fell a dramatic 40% in value this week. The company, now valued at US$37M, debuted only in August with a valuation of US$230M. That’s an 85% loss in value. BigRep had used the SPAC approach to get on the market, which has had similar results for other companies. There were no official announcements from BigRep, so the decline is likely a continuation of the slide that began after its debut.
Velo3D gained 38% this week, but that’s not saying much given their spectacular fall in the past few months, which resulted in their delisting from the major exchanges. Now trading on the over-the-counter market, the company is valued near US$7M. This week’s boost might have something to do with their announcement that they’ve added a new board member, bringing their board to ten members. The addition of a new board member may have provided a slight confidence effect among investors.
Upcoming Changes
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.
