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
3D printing valuation leaderboard (in US$M) [Source: Fabbaloo]
Where do we start?
This week was easily the absolute worst performance since we’ve been tracking the 3D print companies. Major indices were down by seven or eight percent, which are catastrophic level shifts.
The leaderboard total fell by a massive 11.4%, the highest we’ve ever recorded.
Why the sudden drop? It’s very clear that it all has to do with the extraordinary actions by the US government to impose a wide range of questionable tariffs on basically every country in the world. The tariffs are intended to spur domestic manufacturing in the US, but applying them in such a rapid manner has caught everyone without the ability to do so. It takes years to build up manufacturing capacity, if it is even possible. Today’s world economy is highly integrated, and therefore a sudden change of this nature disrupts everything immediately.
Company valuations therefore plummeted on every exchange, including the 3D print companies. Some fared less bad than others, but this week was very bad, and it may be there are more bad weeks ahead.
The two Chinese companies at the top of the leaderboard were not immune to the downturn, as it has gone global. However, Farsoon somehow fell only four percent.
The biggest drop of the week was Xometry, which fell 23% in value, double the leaderboard average this week. While the company had no specific news to provoke the extra large drop, it could be that investors see the demand for manufacturing services falling in the new economic environment. However, rival Proto Labs fell only eleven percent.
This is peculiar, as US domestic manufacturing could be launched faster by using existing manufacturing services that could (relatively) easily expand to meet that demand. In theory they should have risen, but they did not.
The other big development this week was the court ruling that forced Nano Dimension to complete the merger with Desktop Metal. The company had two acquisitions pending when a management change took place, and the two transactions were in limbo. Desktop Metal had previously launched a lawsuit to force completion, successfully, but Markforged had not. That transaction is still pending.
Nano Dimension fell a bit more than the average this week, likely because the hit from paying for Desktop Metal had already been accounted for in their valuation last week, or it could have been more. Markforged remained flat, presumably because investors see the possibility of Nano Dimension following through with the transaction.
This was the most terrible week for the leaderboard, and I fear it may not be the last.
Upcoming Changes
We’ve heard very little about companies intending to become publicly traded recently. This is due to the ongoing lack of investor interest in the technology. The technology’s reputation has suffered immensely in the investment community because of multiple large-scale investment failures in the past few years.
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.
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