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 | 1,116 | -48 |
| 2 | Protolabs | 968 | +14 |
| 3 | Stratasys | 841 | +15 |
| 4 | 3D Systems | 790 | +16 |
| 5 | Nano Dimension | 608 | +20 |
| 6 | Materialise | 387 | +11 |
| 7 | Desktop Metal | 241 | -2 |
| 8 | Markforged | 145 | +2 |
| 9 | Velo3D | 128 | -72 |
| 10 | FATHOM | 32 | +2 |
| 11 | Massivit | 28 | +1 |
| 12 | Freemelt | 18 | +0 |
| 13 | Titomic | 16 | +1 |
| 14 | Shapeways | 15 | +2 |
| 15 | Steakholder Foods | 15 | -1 |
| 16 | voxeljet | 13 | -0 |
| 17 | AML3D | 13 | +0 |
| 18 | Sygnis | 5 | -0 |
| 19 | Aurora Labs | 5 | -1 |
| 20 | Sigma Additive Solutions | 2 | +0 |
| TOTAL | 5,387 | -41 |
This week saw a somewhat down week, which was contrary to overall market trends. While the markets were up a percent of so, the leaderboard dropped. As we will soon see, that was caused by a single company.
That company was none other then Velo3D, the company with perhaps the most volatile valuation in the entire space. This week their valuation dropped by a whopping 36%.
While there wasn’t any specific news from the company that would have driven this shift, one can see the larger pattern at work in this chart of the company’s stock price over the past six months. There’s clearly a longer term trend in the downward direction, and this week more than likely is continuing that trend.
I don’t really understand the volatility. The company’s most recent financial results were actually quite good, and they have highly regarded products and services used by leading companies.
To illustrate how weird this is, take a look at Shapeways. The company’s valuation rose twelve percent this week, in spite of having not the greatest financial results the other week. One just doesn’t know what investors will do. One theory for the sudden interest in Shapeways might be that some investors realized they are in the same business as Xometry and Protolabs, which are both valued at much higher levels. Perhaps they believe Shapeways is a good buy?
At the top of the leaderboard, Xometry dipped some four percent. This is most likely a bit of blowback from their rather sudden rise in the past couple of weeks: some investors were likely taking profits with the higher valuation.
On the Stratasys / 3D Systems watch, we have Stratasys remaining slightly ahead by only six percent. The two have traded places a few times during this tumultuous year.
Upcoming Changes
BigRep announced plans to go public via the SPAC approach, so we will soon see them appear on the leaderboard.
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.
