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 | 1,877 | -36 |
| 2 | Xometry | 1,677 | +104 |
| 3 | Stratasys | 1,414 | -15 |
| 4 | Desktop Metal | 1,331 | -56 |
| 5 | Protolabs | 1,301 | -28 |
| 6 | Materialise | 1,068 | +10 |
| 7 | FATHOM | 1,001 | +165 |
| 8 | Velo3D | 953 | -246 |
| 9 | Nano Dimension | 788 | -31 |
| 10 | Markforged | 705 | -21 |
| 11 | SLM Solutions | 307 | -26 |
| 12 | Shapeways | 125 | +9 |
| 13 | Massivit | 88 | -7 |
| 14 | Meatech 3D | 61 | -5 |
| 15 | Freemelt | 36 | +2 |
| 16 | voxeljet | 31 | -1 |
| 17 | Sigma Labs | 20 | -1 |
| 18 | Sygnis | 12 | 0 |
| 19 | Aurora Labs | 8 | -0 |
| 20 | AML3D | 6 | -0 |
| 21 | Tinkerine | 2 | -0 |
| TOTAL | 12,812 | -183 |
This week saw very little change overall, with the leaderboard total shifting only by a bit more than one percent, in the downward direction. This more or less matched the overall market conditions, which is actually rare for this technology sector. Typically 3D printing investors seem to take an exaggerated view of market conditions and cause the leaderboard to rise far higher — or far lower — than the rest of the market. Not so this week for some reason.
There were, however, a couple of shifts in the leaderboard of note.
The first was Velo3D, which dropped from sixth place to eighth. That is on top of last week’s shift, which saw them fall from second place to sixth with a massive 31% loss in value. This week things seemed to repeat with another significant loss in value of almost 21%, week over week.
That’s quite a shift for a company with very well-thought out technology and a bright future in metal 3D printing. Their technology allows operators to produce very high quality 3D prints using almost no support material, which significantly improves post processing activities.
My thought is that this week’s drop is a continuation of last week’s drop, which I believe was caused by the company’s annual report, released some weeks earlier. In the report the company posted a significant loss in 2021, some 5X larger than in 2020. While it’s likely the company will grow in the future to overcome these early losses, the magnitude of the numbers may have troubled some investors, particularly those focused on shorter term investments.
The other company with notable change on the leaderboard this week was FATHOM, a digital manufacturing company making heavy use of 3D printing technology. The company’s annual report was quite positive, showing 149% growth in revenue. While the company still posted a relatively small loss for the year, their growth curve strongly suggests they will become profitable soon. This evidently attracted many investors that boosted the company’s value over the past couple of weeks. This week they saw a healthy rise in valuation of almost 20%.
The curious thing is that the company issued their annual report a month ago, and investors seem to be digesting it only now, weeks later.
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.
