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 | 1,715 | -162 |
| 2 | Xometry | 1,640 | -37 |
| 3 | Stratasys | 1,378 | -36 |
| 4 | Desktop Metal | 1,231 | -101 |
| 5 | Protolabs | 1,228 | -73 |
| 6 | Materialise | 1,049 | -19 |
| 7 | FATHOM | 889 | -112 |
| 8 | Velo3D | 854 | -99 |
| 9 | Nano Dimension | 777 | -11 |
| 10 | Markforged | 649 | -56 |
| 11 | SLM Solutions | 298 | -9 |
| 12 | Shapeways | 124 | -1 |
| 13 | Massivit | 84 | -4 |
| 14 | Meatech 3D | 61 | +1 |
| 15 | Freemelt | 37 | +0 |
| 16 | voxeljet | 31 | +0 |
| 17 | Sigma Labs | 20 | -0 |
| 18 | Sygnis | 12 | 0 |
| 19 | Aurora Labs | 9 | +0 |
| 20 | AML3D | 6 | -1 |
| 21 | Tinkerine | 2 | -0 |
| TOTAL | 12,093 | -719 |
This week saw a general downturn in the overall market, and as you might expect, pulled down the 3D printing players even more. For some reason, this technology niche is multiply affected — both positively and negatively — by general market swings. Over the week the leaderboard’s total value dropped about six percent.
Of course, those percents were mixed across the leaderboard companies, with some gains and more losses in valuation.
Leader 3D Systems dropped almost nine percent with news they have set a date for releasing their first quarter results: May 9th. I am very curious about this drop because in recent times 3D Systems has been (finally) cleaning up their financials and moving forward. It is entirely possible they have very good financial results.
They’re hosting an “Inventor Day” on May 16th, so we may learn more about their plans. The fact that they are hosting such an event suggests positive results, so I still don’t understand this week’s drop.
Velo3D dropped in value again this week, continuing a baffling valuation pattern. In the three weeks prior to this one, Velo3D’s value dropped by 21%, 31%, and 7%. This week their value dropped yet again, another ten percent.
The company’s market capitalization is now US$854M, down from a high last November of US$2,240M. At points during the seven months since they went public Velo3D has occupied second place on the leaderboard. Today we find them in eighth place. This is extremely confusing to me, as Velo3D seems to have all the right elements for success in play: unique and powerful product; established in a strongly growing market (aerospace); and growing revenue. What are investors seeing that I am not? There has been zero negative news about Velo3D.
Finally, as the first major 3D print exhibition (Rapid+TCT) approaches in May, we are likely to see product and service announcements from a number of companies on the leaderboard that could drive their valuations up. Or down.
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.
