Once again we take a look at the valuations of the major 3D printing companies over the past week – but this week we’re looking at the entire year.
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 take a look at the 3D printing companies on this week’s list.
3D Printing Leaderboard
| RANK (PREV) | COMPANY | CAP | CHG |
| 1 | 3D Systems | 2767 | -62 |
| 2 | Xometry | 2277 | +14 |
| 3 (4) | Stratasys | 1603 | +35 |
| 4 (3) | Desktop Metal | 1540 | -124 |
| 5 (7) | Velo3D | 1431 | +35 |
| 6 (5) | Protolabs | 1417 | -39 |
| 7 (6) | Materialise | 1389 | -38 |
| 8 (9) | Markforged | 998 | -15 |
| 9 (8) | Nano Dimension | 946 | -77 |
| 10 | SLM Solutions | 432 | +9 |
| 11 | Shapeways | 179 | +1 |
| 12 | Massivit | 122 | +3 |
| 13 | MeaTech 3D | 81 | -2 |
| 14 | voxeljet | 42 | 0 |
| 15 | Aurora Labs | 12 | +1 |
| 16 | AML3D | 10 | 0 |
| 17 | Tinkerine | 2 | 0 |
| TOTAL | 15245 | -258 |
This week saw most flat results, with the exceptions being notable rises in value for Xometry, which seems to be catching up with leader 3D Systems, and also SLM Solutions and Massivit.
Desktop Metal suffered a slight loss, but it was sufficient for them to fall to fourth place, with Stratasys zooming up the list to third position. Materialise and Velo3D swapped fifth and seventh positions due to minor changes in value. Markforged and Nano Dimension also swapped positions eight and nine. The fact is these companies were all very similarly valued, thus even slight changes will toss them around the leaderboard like frogs in spring.
Being the last report for the 2021 year, I thought we’d look back and see how these companies have changed value over the entire year.
Unfortunately we didn’t start this series until March, so I had to do some research to figure out the values of the companies as of January 2021. Let’s take a look at the changes that occurred over all of 2021:
| RANK | COMPANY | CAP | CHG |
| 1 | 3D Systems | 2767 | +1388 |
| 2 | Xometry | 2277 | NA |
| 3 | Stratasys | 1603 | +238 |
| 4 | Desktop Metal | 1540 | -3539 |
| 5 | Velo3D | 1431 | NA |
| 6 | Protolabs | 1417 | -2870 |
| 7 | Materialise | 1389 | -1953 |
| 8 | Markforged | 998 | -1009 |
| 9 | Nano Dimension | 946 | -1179 |
| 10 | SLM Solutions | 432 | +7 |
| 11 | Shapeways | 179 | NA |
| 12 | Massivit | 122 | NA |
| 13 | MeaTech 3D | 81 | NA |
| 14 | voxeljet | 42 | -28 |
| 15 | Aurora Labs | 12 | +3 |
| 16 | AML3D | 10 | -15 |
| 17 | Tinkerine | 2 | 0 |
| TOTAL | 15245 | -4889 |
The first thing to notice is that there are several missing entries because those companies weren’t on the stock market at the time (or I could not locate any earlier information, specifically for Massivit).
One trend that is clearly apparent is that most 3D print companies lost a significant amount of value over 2021. In total almost US$5B in value was lost by the companies we track .While there was a period in the March zone where most of them incurred price boosts, this was likely due to the anticipation of opening things up after the pandemic.
Of course, that didn’t really happen, or at least as much as was anticipated. As a result, the booming prices of Spring made way to the languishing valuations towards the end of the year.
Some companies suffered huge losses in value, particularly Desktop Metal, which lost around 70% of its value as compared to a year ago. However, this is likely because at that time there were new to the market and their value was still being settled by investors, perhaps being set a bit high. Subsequently pandemic complications likely drove the price downward.
They weren’t alone, as Materialise, Protolabs, Markforged, voxeljet, AML3D all incurred tremendous losses in market cap. It was an industry thing.
However, there is an exception: 3D Systems, which started the year way down the list, crawled their way to the top by May timeframe. This is due to their new CEO’s massive changes: divestitures, refocus on specific industry segments (especially healthcare), and general cleanup, resulted in the first truly positive financial results for the company in many years. Their reward: doubling of their valuation and first place on our leaderboard, and they’ve maintained that position for most of the year.
Upcoming Changes
What will 2022 bring? It’s likely the pandemic will begin to truly fade, and production will increase, bringing added value to all of the companies we’re tracking.
We’re also likely to see several new companies appear on our leaderboard as they become public. Some have already announced their intentions, while others could be a surprise.
We are still awaiting the appearance on the market of two other 3D print companies. One is FATHOM, a digital manufacturer, which has been developing a SPAC (Special Purpose Acquisition Company) maneuver to complete later this year. The other is Fast Radius, a digital manufacturing cloud service.
Another company set to appear in early 2022 is Essentium, who announced plans to use a SPAC-merger to launch on NASDAQ.
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, 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.
