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 | Xometry | $904 | +121 |
| 2 | Protolabs | $748 | +35 |
| 3 | Stratasys | $525 | +22 |
| 4 | Nano Dimension | $474 | +24 |
| 5 | 3D Systems | $326 | -4 |
| 6 | Materialise | $317 | -8 |
| 7 | BigRep | $136 | -11 |
| 8 | Desktop Metal | $135 | -6 |
| 9 | Titomic | $116 | -0 |
| 10 | Markforged | $54 | +5 |
| 11 | AML3D | $37 | -2 |
| 12 | Aurora Labs | $19 | -1 |
| 13 | Massivit | $12 | +1 |
| 14 | Velo3D | $11 | -8 |
| 15 | Freemelt | $10 | -0 |
| 16 | Steakholder Foods | $8 | +0 |
| 17 | Sygnis | $4 | -0 |
| TOTAL | $3,834 | +168 |
This week saw a recovery from last week’s catastrophic drop, with a leaderboard recovery of over 4.5%. However, the markets were all up, dragging the 3D print companies with them. In fact, NASDAQ rose more than the leaderboard, suggesting that there is still doubt about 3D printing among investors.
Many companies bounced upwards, and some stayed flat, with one very big exception.
Leader Xometry topped the risers, gaining a huge 15% this week, and with good reason. Their financials released last week were quite positive, with increases in revenue, gross profit and margin. However, they still posted a net loss of about US$2M for the quarter.
Markforged bounced up ten percent, on mixed financial results. They improved margin and expenses, but lost some revenue. Their net loss was less, so things are improving, possibly leading to this week’s gain.
Newcomer BigRep suffered an eight percent loss this week. The company entered the stock market only a couple of weeks ago with great fanfare and good investor interest. Since the opening, the valuation has been decreasing. This is typical after a stock appears: many investors want to get in on the ground floor, so there is a flurry of interest at the beginning. All normal. What counts is what happens in the long term.
The big news this week is Velo3D, which suffered a major loss in valuation of over 42%. This is again due to released financials, which showed that the company’s revenue for the quarter dropped from US$25.1M in 2023 to only US$10.3M this year. That would be quite concerning for investors. The margin turned upside down, and the net loss increased to US$21.7M.
This is all not good. Velo3D CEO Brad Kreger explained:
“Our second quarter results also reflected the impact of delays in the funding of certain governmental projects with those system orders now expected in the second half of the year. While we still expect to close these transactions, these delays have negatively impacted our revenue forecast for the balance of the year. As a result, we have instituted a number of material cost reduction programs to reduce expenses and manage our liquidity, including a headcount reduction of approximately 30%. We expect these programs to drive significant annual operating savings and we continue to look at various options to support our balance sheet during our ongoing the strategic review process.”
That may all be true, but it seems that many investors slid out the door, with the company’s valuation at now under US$11M. This is an incredibly huge decline for a company that had a valuation of US$2.2B in 2021, and even US$119M in April of this year. That’s a 99.5% drop from peak valuation.
With all the merger talk going around, it is somehow very surprising that another large 3D print company doesn’t open up their wallet and acquire Velo3D outright. The company has incredible technology used by leading companies, and could instantly form a metal division for someone. Another possibility is that one of Velo3D’s major customers might acquire them to ensure the technology continues.
Upcoming Changes
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.
Another company that would seem logical to go public is VulcanForms, a manufacturing service using an advanced metal 3D printing process. They are currently privately valued at over US$1B, and going public could cause that to go even higher.
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.
