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 | Bright Laser | $1,697 | +1697 |
| 2 | Xometry | $995 | +91 |
| 3 | Farsoon | $891 | +891 |
| 4 | Protolabs | $770 | +22 |
| 5 | Stratasys | $551 | +27 |
| 6 | Nano Dimension | $494 | +20 |
| 7 | 3D Systems | $351 | +25 |
| 8 | Materialise | $325 | +8 |
| 9 | Desktop Metal | $144 | +9 |
| 10 | Titomic | $105 | -12 |
| 11 | BigRep | $100 | -36 |
| 12 | Markforged | $54 | -0 |
| 13 | AML3D | $31 | -6 |
| 14 | Aurora Labs | $17 | -3 |
| 15 | Massivit | $12 | -0 |
| 16 | Velo3D | $11 | +0 |
| 17 | Freemelt | $10 | +0 |
| 18 | Steakholder Foods | $7 | -0 |
| 19 | Sygnis | $4 | +0 |
| TOTAL | $6,569 | +6569 |
This week saw markets in general up decent amounts, often a percentage or more. Most of the companies on the leaderboard acted alongside the pattern, gaining 2-4%.
However, the leaderboard total is almost double last week’s total, and there’s a different reason for that. At the suggestion of Anisoprint CTO Fedor Antonov, we have added two large Chinese companies to the list. Both Xi’An Bright Laser Technologies Co. Ltd. and Farsoon Technologies Co. Ltd. are publicly traded companies — on the Shanghai exchange. Both companies focus on metal additive manufacturing, and thus qualify for inclusion on the leaderboard.
To my surprise, their valuation is quite high compared to the Western companies. “BLT” has a valuation of US$1.7B, putting them by far at the top of the leaderboard, with Farsoon not far behind in third spot at a US$891 valuation this week. Their valuation is no doubt a reflection on their dominance in the massive Chinese market, and their global presence. BLT’s valuation exceeds the sum of all the companies past position five on the leaderboard.
In other news, newcomer BigRep continues to drop in valuation, this week a whopping 26%. The valuation has fallen almost 60% since they entered the market via SPAC some weeks ago. There has been no official news to drive this trend, so it appears it may simply be the shine of a new company on the market wearing off.
One other group of companies defied the trend this week, and that was the three Australian metal 3D printer manufacturers, Aurora Labs, Titomic and AML3D. All have been volatile in varying amounts in recent weeks, but this week they all dropped, 13, 16 and 10% respectively.
Of course, there was no news from AML3D and Titomic to trigger this shift, but Aurora Labs reported they’ve enabled their new AL250 metal 3D printer for production in their print services facility. Small cap stocks such as these tend to jump up and down in value far more than the larger players, but it seems that investors took a negative view of Australian metal 3D printing this week. It may be that after several weeks of gains driven by partnership announcements has worn off, and profit-taking occurred.
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.
