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 | $1,781 | +130 |
| 2 | Xometry | $1,552 | -6 |
| 3 | Farsoon | $1,338 | +249 |
| 4 | Proto Labs | $1,010 | -10 |
| 5 | Stratasys | $685 | +12 |
| 6 | Nano Dimension | $478 | +12 |
| 7 | Materialise | $440 | +3 |
| 8 | 3D Systems | $397 | -29 |
| 9 | Titomic | $192 | +5 |
| 10 | Desktop Metal | $139 | -10 |
| 11 | Markforged | $82 | -9 |
| 12 | AML3D | $49 | -2 |
| 13 | BigRep | $36 | -3 |
| 14 | Aurora Labs | $21 | +3 |
| 15 | Velo3D | $13 | +3 |
| 16 | Freemelt | $8 | +3 |
| 17 | Massivit | $7 | +1 |
| 18 | Steakholder Foods | $6 | -0 |
| 19 | Sygnis | $2 | +1 |
| TOTAL | $8,236 | +352 |
This week saw upward trends on all major markets, a good thing for all. The 3D print leaderboard reacted positively, with a 4.5% gain on the week.
At the top of the leaderboard, Bright laser added almost eight percent to their valuation, with third place Farsoon gaining a whopping 23% this week. Their gain this week exceeds the valuation of eacb company in positions 9+ on the leaderboard, to put that in perspective.
I searched high and low to find out what might have caused this jump in valuation, and found nothing. In fact, it is actually quite challenging to find public information for the company. However, I did find documents related to an extraordinary general meeting earlier in November. In this meeting, among other things, the company made changes at the board level. It may be that the valuation jump may have something to do with that announcement.
3D Systems’ valuation dropped almost seven percent, bucking the overall trend. The trigger seems to be their release of 3Q financials on November 26, which showed that revenue dropped nine percent over last year.
Both Desktop Metal and Markforged, companies in the midst of being acquired, fell seven and ten percent respectively. This is quite curious, because Markforged’s purchase offer is at a valuation of US$100M, more than the current value of the company, US$82M. Could this suggest there are challenges in closing the deal?
BigRep resumed its fall, dropping over eight percent this week. The company’s valuation has suffered significantly since going public via SPAC in September.
Aurora Labs, one of the several Australian metal 3D printer manufacturers, jumped 16% this week. This seems to be related to a corporate move where some expiring director’s options were replaced by a new and larger set of stock options. These were distributed among three directors. It could be that the market sees the leaders of the company piling up on options, suggesting they believe in a profitable future.
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.
