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 | 3D Systems | 1,913 | -245 |
| 2 | Xometry | 1,573 | -83 |
| 3 | Stratasys | 1,429 | -249 |
| 4 | Desktop Metal | 1,387 | -94 |
| 5 | Protolabs | 1,329 | -144 |
| 6 | Velo3D | 1,199 | -545 |
| 7 | Materialise | 1,058 | -93 |
| 8 | FATHOM | 836 | -99 |
| 9 | Nano Dimension | 819 | -42 |
| 10 | Markforged | 726 | -38 |
| 11 | SLM Solutions | 333 | -23 |
| 12 | Shapeways | 116 | +7 |
| 13 | Massivit | 95 | -6 |
| 14 | Meatech 3D | 65 | -9 |
| 15 | Freemelt | 34 | -3 |
| 16 | voxeljet | 32 | +3 |
| 17 | Sigma Labs | 21 | -0 |
| 18 | Sygnis | 12 | 0 |
| 19 | Aurora Labs | 9 | -2 |
| 20 | AML3D | 7 | -1 |
| 21 | Tinkerine | 2 | -0 |
| TOTAL | 12,996 | -1666 |
This week saw a couple of big shifts on our leaderboard amid a significant drop in overall value.
The leaderboard’s total value dropped by over 11% this week, mostly due to synchronization with the general market conditions. However, some companies took higher losses than others.
While 3D Systems remains in top spot with the highest valuation of any company we track, second place Velo3D plummeted to sixth place with a huge decrease in value of over 31%.
The majority of the loss occurred on Wednesday, when at least one publication rated Velo3D as “Bearish”. This is likely due to their most recent financial results for 2021.
While the company increased its revenue from US$19M to US$27M and even gained a gross profit of US$5M, there was a very high operating expense of US$63M and a convertible note loss of US$51M, leading to an overall loss for 2021 of US$107M. That compares to 2020’s loss of US$22M, almost 5X higher this year. These figures are likely quite scary to some investors who looked through the company’s details and made a decision to sell.
Nevertheless, Velo3D has an outstanding an unique product in the hottest sector of the AM market: metal 3D printing for aerospace. This area still has a long way to grow, and I suspect that Velo3D will be back up on the leaderboard before too long.
MeaTech 3D dropped over 12% on the week, likely due to the company missing financial targets. That always causes an adjustment to the company’s stock value.
Aurora Labs dropped almost 19% over the week, which is not unheard of for small-cap stocks like this Australian company, which is developing a high-speed metal 3D printer. The drop could be attributed to their recent financial statements, which showed exactly zero income for this quarter from customers. While that looks quite scary, this is a company still developing its product and regular sales should not be expected yet.
Two companies somehow managed to be above zero this week: voxeljet and Shapeways. Both companies have had depressed valuations of late, and it may be that buyers saw an opportunity to get in at a low price as the overall market fell.
Upcoming Changes
We are still awaiting the appearance on the market of one more 3D print company: Fast Radius, a digital manufacturing cloud service that announced their intention to go public.
Another company set to appear in early 2022 is 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.
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.
