Who’s The Biggest In 3D Printing, December 22, 2024

By on December 22nd, 2024 in Corporate, news

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Who's The Biggest In 3D Printing
Which 3D print company is the biggest this week? [Image by Stefan Keller from Pixabay]
Who's The Biggest In 3D Printing
Which 3D print company is the biggest this week? [Image by Stefan Keller from Pixabay]

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

RANKCOMPANYCAPCHG
1Xometry$2,065+342
2Bright Laser$1,586-153
3Farsoon$1,287-202
4Proto Labs$998-70
5Stratasys$675-45
6Nano Dimension$551+49
73D Systems$475-64
8Materialise$440-27
9Titomic$129-30
10Desktop Metal$95-29
11Markforged$66-21
12AML3D$47-4
13BigRep$32-11
14Aurora Labs$18-2
15Velo3D$9-1
16Massivit$8+0
17Freemelt$5-2
18Steakholder Foods$5+0
19Sygnis$2+0
TOTAL$8,492-269
3D printing valuation leaderboard (in US$M) [Source: Fabbaloo]

This week saw notable declines on the major stock exchanges, with two to four percent dips all around. The 3D print companies fared about the same, with the leaderboard dropping “only” three percent. This is interesting because normally the leaderboard exaggerates the overall trends, but this week it was right in the middle of the trends.

At the top of the leaderboard we’ve had Bright Laser and Farsoon, ever since we added them a few months ago. These two enormous Chinese companies both suffered notable drops in valuation this week, 9 and 14 percent respectively.

Those drops allowed Xometry to leap ahead into first place on the leaderboard once again. For many months prior Xometry was on top, until suffering a rather large and unexplained drop some months ago.

Now it appears they’ve recovered, largely based on stellar financials posted this past week. The company reported strong growth in a number of factors, suggesting their approach to running a manufacturing service is working. Investment analysts switched their recommendations for the company, resulting in a huge 20% gain.

The other big news this week had to do with Nano Dimension. The company’s board of directors was entirely swapped out to a group of eager investors that had sued the company earlier. The whole story is here, but it means the company will almost certainly change its strategy away from acquisitions. The market reacted very positively, pushing the company’s valuation up ten percent.

But there was collateral damage: two companies, Markforged and Desktop Metal, have signed deals to be acquired by Nano Dimension. However, those deals have not been closed, and it’s very possible the deals may be cancelled by Nano Dimension as part of a strategic change.

This left those two companies at risk of not being acquired, and the market reacted appropriately by dropping each of their valuations by around 25%. It will be quite interesting to see how this plays out. If Nano Dimension does indeed cancel the acquisitions, then those two companies will be valued on their own, and that could be different from today’s valuation.

There’s more: Desktop Metal just filed a lawsuit against Nano Dimension, alleging that the acquiring company has unnecessarily delayed obtaining regulatory approval for the merger, and asks the court to force Nano Dimension to complete the necessary steps ASAP. It appears that Desktop Metal is quite eager to get this over with, likely because a change in management at Nano Dimension might cancel the acquisition entirely. A cancellation would most likely trigger a healthy penalty payment to Desktop Metal, as such terms are typical in acquisition agreements.

3D Systems fell twelve percent this week, likely due to investors reading their latest financial results, which showed declining revenues and profits over the previous year.

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.

By Kerry Stevenson

Kerry Stevenson, aka "General Fabb" has written over 8,000 stories on 3D printing at Fabbaloo since he launched the venture in 2007, with an intention to promote and grow the incredible technology of 3D printing across the world. So far, it seems to be working!