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 | Protolabs | $746 | -140 |
| 2 | Xometry | $671 | -71 |
| 3 | Stratasys | $567 | -54 |
| 4 | Nano Dimension | $520 | -24 |
| 5 | 3D Systems | $442 | -65 |
| 6 | Materialise | $385 | +48 |
| 7 | BigRep | $230 | +230 |
| 8 | Desktop Metal | $147 | -15 |
| 9 | Titomic | $92 | -11 |
| 10 | Markforged | $69 | -10 |
| 11 | AML3D | $38 | -0 |
| 12 | Velo3D | $20 | -5 |
| 13 | Aurora Labs | $19 | -3 |
| 14 | Freemelt | $12 | +1 |
| 15 | Massivit | $12 | -4 |
| 16 | Steakholder Foods | $7 | -1 |
| 17 | Sygnis | $4 | +0 |
| TOTAL | $3,980 | -122 |
This week saw disastrous results on the markets in general, which fell 2-5% this week. Normally the 3D print companies exaggerate larger trends, so you’d think there would be a collapse on the leaderboard this week.
There was — and there wasn’t.
There was because the companies on the last from last week in aggregate lost a whopping eight percent in value over the week.
There wasn’t because the leaderboard dropped by only just over two percent, less than the overall markets. Wait, how can this be?
It’s because of the big news of the week: BigRep has become a public company and therefore now appears on the leaderboard.
The Berlin company produces large-format 3D printers, and has been very successful in doing so over their ten years of existence. They became a public company via the SPAC approach, were they merge with a holding company that’s already on the stock market.
Interestingly, BigRep’s initial week’s valuation is quite high, well over US$200M. This exceeds the current valuation of Desktop Metal and Markforged, combined! The additional value BigRep added to the leaderboard somewhat dampened the otherwise dismal week.
Most companies lost significant value this week, averaging around seven percent each. However, as always there were some exceptions.
Protolabs fell more than double the average loss this week, likely due to their latest financial results. The results weren’t necessarily bad: they made profit this past quarter, whereas they did not in the corresponding quarter last year. The issue is likely that they haven’t significantly grown revenue year over year. It is up, but perhaps not as much as investors had hoped for this promising company.
Materialise surprisingly rose over 14% this week, the one bright spot amidst all the gloom. The company’s valuation spiked on July 31st, which just happened to be the day they released their prior quarter financial results. In the results we see that they strongly increased their revenue year over year, and at the same time also turned a significant profit. If they can make more money with the same revenue, great. If they make even more revenue, that’s even better.
Velo3D tumbled a huge 20% this week. While there was no official news from the company to trigger this slide, it seems they’ve been on a downward trend for several weeks. This week is a continuation of that trend, albeit a bit more sharply. The overall market trends didn’t help.
Massivit dropped almost 25% in value this week. While some of that drop was certainly due to the inclement investing weather this week, the rest might have something to do with the abrupt departure of long-time CEO Eriz Zimmerman. Zimmerman spent eight years with Massivit, building it up to the company it is today. While it appears the departure was cordial in press releases, it may be that investors are interpreting this as a negative move. That’s particularly possible as Massivit did not even mention an interim CEO in their press release.
And they said not much happens during the summer.
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.
