Who’s The Biggest In 3D Printing, August 29, 2021

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.

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 first take a look at the major 3D printing companies on this week’s list. I consider these companies “major” because their market valuations are significantly larger than others in the space.

Major Players

RANK	COMPANY	CAP (M)	CHG (M)
1	3D Systems	3756	+263
2	Xometry	3089	+282
3	Desktop Metal	2122	+209
4	Protolabs	2009	+62
5	Markforged	1538	+61
6	Nano Dimensions	1510	+107
7	Stratasys	1319	+29
8	Materialise	1246	+68
9	ExOne	538	+31
10	SLM Solutions	505	+63
	TOTAL	17632

This week saw positive news almost entirely across the board.

Unlike many previous weeks, the market capitalization of almost every company we’re tracking rose notably during this past week.

Still on top is 3D Systems, who maintained their lead with a gain of 7.5% in value. However, in the next two positions both Xometry and Desktop Metal gained over ten percent each. While Xometry remains in second position, Desktop Metal’s gain was sufficient for them to leap over Protolabs, who saw a relatively lower gain of only three percent.

The winner of the gains this week had to be SLM Solutions, our tenth-place company, which saw a massive gain of over 14%.

It turns out there is a relationship between SLM Solutions and Desktop Metal that no doubt contributed to both their rises this week. A report on Bloomberg indicates the two companies have recently been exploring an acquisition.

This falls in line with recent activity from Desktop Metal, which has been strongly leveraging its massive war chest generated by several investments and stock price gains. The company has most recently picked up Aerosint and ExOne, among others. (Note that ExOne still appears on our leaderboard because the acquisition has not yet closed.)

Should Desktop Metal acquire SLM Solutions, it would provide them with yet another in-house 3D printing process, and a metal one at that. Metal 3D printing is where the money is these days, and Desktop Metal’s growing umbrella of not only technologies but distribution networks could supercharge SLM Solution’s progress.

However, according to Bloomberg:

“Desktop Metal signaled its interest in making an all-stock bid valuing the German company at around 600 million euros ($713 million), according to the people. The two firms held some informal talks about the potential offer of roughly 30 euros per share before Desktop Metal decided not to proceed, the people said, asking not to be identified because the information is private.”

In spite of the deal not proceeding, stock prices for both companies still rose significantly. This may be a case of, where there is smoke, there is fire. It could be the two come back for a future deal, or at the very least this scenario indicates that Desktop Metal is still on the hunt for metal 3D printer companies.

Other Players

RANK	COMPANY	CAP	CHG
11	MeaTech	89	+9
12	voxeljet	54	+4
13	ARC Group WW	26	0
14	AML3D	18	-2
15	Aurora Labs	12	0
16	Tinkerine	3	0
TBD	Massivit	TBD	TBD
	TOTAL	201	+12

The lesser valued companies tend to have much smaller shifts in their market capitalization because there is far less trading occurring on their stocks. The big money tends to hover around the larger players.

This week saw some similar movement to the larger players, however in a more volatile way as is often seen in lower-priced stocks.

MeaTech and voxeljet both saw rises around ten percent, but AML3D saw their value drop by a notable 12%. It’s not clear why their value dropped so significantly, particularly during a week when other 3D printer companies saw huge rises. However, their price has been gradually sliding downward for almost a year, so perhaps this is more of the same.

Note that we are unable to obtain Massivit’s market cap value, as it does not seem to be published, even though they are a publicly traded company on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange.

Upcoming Changes

We are still awaiting the appearance on the market of two major companies, Shapeways and VELO3D, both of which are likely to take positions on the major players list.

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 now 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.