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 | 1,456 | -332 |
| 2 | 3D Systems | 1,085 | -130 |
| 3 | Stratasys | 803 | -35 |
| 4 | Protolabs | 725 | +48 |
| 5 | Nano Dimension | 620 | +88 |
| 6 | Materialise | 540 | -15 |
| 7 | SLM Solutions | 481 | +8 |
| 8 | Desktop Metal | 441 | -95 |
| 9 | Velo3D | 313 | -39 |
| 10 | FATHOM | 281 | -75 |
| 11 | Markforged | 158 | -29 |
| 12 | Massivit | 53 | +0 |
| 13 | Steakholder Foods | 45 | 0 |
| 14 | Shapeways | 26 | -4 |
| 15 | Freemelt | 24 | -2 |
| 16 | Titomic | 22 | +0 |
| 17 | voxeljet | 18 | -3 |
| 18 | Sygnis | 11 | -1 |
| 19 | Sigma Additive Solutions | 11 | 0 |
| 20 | AML3D | 9 | +0 |
| 21 | Aurora Labs | 3 | +0 |
| 22 | Tinkerine | 1 | -0 |
| TOTAL | 7,129 | -615 |
This week was pretty lousy for all concerned. The markets in general were down about two percent, which is notable, and the NASDAQ dropped by three percent, as technical stocks are considered more volatile.
If tech stocks in general are considered volatile, then 3D print stocks have even greater volatility, and that was demonstrably shown in this week’s results.
Our leaderboard’s total value dropped by a whopping eight percent. To illustrate how dramatic that is, consider that it would take only 13 weeks at that rate to obliterate the value of all companies on the list. Hopefully this is a temporary “dip”.
Most companies suffered large dents in their valuations this week, with a third with losses greater than ten percent.
The biggest loss of the week was FATHOM, which dropped a massive 21% in value over the week. This is likely due to investor reactions to their recently released financial results. In their posting, they indicated quarterly revenue was actually slightly lower than last year’s Q3 results. This is surprising, given that most companies in the space are now growing. However, they also indicated their year to date revenue is ahead of 2021. It didn’t help that their EBITDA and margin are all lower than last year, and investors reacted, pushing the loss greater than the average.
Position one on the leaderboard remains in the hands of Xometry, but that company suffered a 19% loss in value this week, also quite significant. The company’s valuation has been slowly dropping for several weeks now, and I’m wondering if it’s heading back to a natural level given their incredible build up earlier in the year. At one point this company’s valuation exceeded that of both 3D Systems and Stratasys combined. That’s not nearly the case now, and the gap between 3D Systems and Xometry is slowly closing.
Desktop Metal dropped their valuation by almost 18% this week, which appears to be a continuation of investor sentiment after the company released their Q3 results earlier. It could even be an earlier trend, as I just notice their valuation has actually dropped for six consecutive weeks. This is quite curious, as their financial results weren’t too bad, and they’ve shown considerable growth in revenue. However, in spite of the increased revenue, they did post a loss for Q3, which is likely the trigger for the valuation drop.
One company to buck the trend was Protolabs, which actually rose seven percent during this awful week. The reason for this is very likely a recent announcement of a US$50M increase in their stock buyback program. This move will effectively take shares off the market, and thus drive up the price for the remaining shares.
Another outlier was Nano Dimension, which rose a massive 16 percent this week. The company has recently the subject of a number of disturbing allegations of corporate takeovers and other activities, which have caused the company’s valuation to rise and fall dramatically. This week the company issued an extremely interesting and dramatic “response to recent shareholder activity” after a special general meeting was held. In the response, they say:
“Nano Dimension’s capital has become a target and temptation for entities with an interest in taking over the Company for their business or personal needs. Their actions suggest they have the intention of dismantling the Company.
We, Nano Dimension management, are aware of this and will protect the Company from any attempt to harm or impose measures that are not in the best of the Company and its shareholders. In the coming months, there may be further attempts to interrupt the Company’s conduct of business with the intention of inhibiting the Company’s ability to execute on its vision and strategy. Such attempts may be made based on the interests of specific shareholders and competitors, who are more focused on seizing Nano Dimension’s capital for their own benefit and their business affairs.”
Evidently this response was sufficient to regain confidence of some investors and thus their valuations rose appropriately.
Upcoming Changes
A company set to appear was Essentium, who announced plans to use a SPAC-merger to launch on NASDAQ. However, that deal has been suspended so we’re wondering what the company’s next steps might be.
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.
