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 take a look at the 3D printing companies on this week’s list.
3D Printing Leaderboard
| RANK | COMPANY | CAP | CHG |
| 1 | 3D Systems | 2854 | +142 |
| 2 | Xometry | 2054 | +127 |
| 3 | Desktop Metal | 1807 | +37 |
| 4 | VELO3D | 1658 | +62 |
| 5 | Stratasys | 1631 | +45 |
| 6 | Protolabs | 1367 | +15 |
| 7 | Materialise | 1367 | +98 |
| 8 | Nano Dimension | 1077 | +22 |
| 9 | Markforged | 976 | -121 |
| 10 | SLM Solutions | 419 | +4 |
| 11 | Shapeways | 174 | 0 |
| 12 | Massivit | 119 | +3 |
| 13 | MeaTech 3D | 80 | -2 |
| 14 | voxeljet | 50 | +1 |
| 15 | Aurora Labs | 13 | -1 |
| 16 | AML3D | 11 | 0 |
| 17 | Tinkerine | 2 | 0 |
| TOTAL | 15569 | +435 |
This week saw a general recovery from last week’s catastrophic declines. Evidently the market’s fears were somewhat allayed, resulting in rises in value of between 2-7 percent.
However, there was one big exception: Markforged suffered a rather large drop of eleven percent over the week. This is most likely due to an update to their otherwise good quarterly results. Apparently the original report somehow missed including stock compensation expenses for three quarters, causing the actual operational profit to be only US$21.7M instead of the originally reported US$23.9M for the quarter, and US$0.6M instead of US$2.8M for the year-to-date.
The company was off by only a couple of million, yet somehow investors decided to punish the company with a massive US$121M valuation drop over the week. Evidently the mistake caused a bit of a confidence gap with investors. This resulted in Markforged dropping one rank to position nine this week.
Meanwhile, Desktop Metal announced a rather large sale of nearly US$8M to an unnamed German automobile maker. This seemed to have little effect on the company’s valuation, however.
Xometry announced the acquisition of purchase of Thomas, a large source for connecting to equipment and materials providers. The move is intriguing, as it puts Xometry in a more broad position in the manufacturing industry. However, the US$300M acquisition pushed up their valuation by only a little over six percent.
MeaTech 3D, developers of a 3D printed cultured meat solution, announced their achievement of the world’s largest 3D printed steak. While this caused their stock to rise somewhat during the week, they ended up actually down a couple of percent by week’s end. Perhaps this shows that investors are not as interested in flashy announcements and are looking for more meaty material. (Sorry.)
Upcoming Changes
We are still awaiting the appearance on the market of two other 3D print companies. One is FATHOM, a digital manufacturer, which has been developing a SPAC (Special Purpose Acquisition Company) maneuver to complete later this year. The other is Fast Radius, a digital manufacturing cloud service.
Another company set to appear in early 2022 is Essentium, who announced plans to use a SPAC-merger to launch on NASDAQ.
Another company I want to put on the radar is Italy-based Roboze. The company has specialized in high-temperature equipment for industry, but this week revealed new private investment from industry leaders who now sit on the company’s advisory board. While they haven’t announced anything specific about a public offering, it seems to me they may be considering it in the future given their recent moves and rapid growth.
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, 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.
