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 | 1,567 | +208 |
| 2 | Protolabs | 1,014 | +39 |
| 3 | Stratasys | 907 | +34 |
| 4 | 3D Systems | 829 | -27 |
| 5 | Nano Dimension | 608 | +3 |
| 6 | Materialise | 397 | +15 |
| 7 | Desktop Metal | 246 | +8 |
| 8 | Markforged | 143 | +4 |
| 9 | Velo3D | 115 | +1 |
| 10 | FATHOM | 30 | -1 |
| 11 | Massivit | 31 | +2 |
| 12 | Titomic | 23 | -3 |
| 13 | Freemelt | 18 | -1 |
| 14 | AML3D | 15 | +0 |
| 15 | Steakholder Foods | 14 | -1 |
| 16 | Shapeways | 14 | +0 |
| 17 | voxeljet | 11 | -0 |
| 18 | Aurora Labs | 5 | -1 |
| 19 | Sygnis | 5 | +0 |
| 20 | Sigma Additive Solutions | 2 | -0 |
| TOTAL | 5,994 | +282 |
This week saw notable gains once again, with the leaderboard leaping upwards by almost five percent. While most markets rose by less than a percent, it seems that investors looked on the 3D companies favorably. On the other hand, it could be a bit of a recovery after some pretty damaging drops throughout the year.
On yet another hand, most of this week’s gains were focused on one company, and that would be Xometry. The company has been at the top of the leaderboard for a couple of weeks now, and even a slight movement is noticeable.
This week they jumped 15%, which represents over US$200M of the US$282M gain in this week’s leaderboard total. Yes, Xometry is the root of this week’s gain.
Xometry did not release any specific official news to drive this change, but my suspicion is that the company is still in recovery mode from a very sudden drop earlier this year. At this point they now have a US$500M cushion between them and second place Protolabs.
Titomic took a twelve percent dip this week, which at first might seem significant. However, the company’s valuation mysteriously boosted skywards more than 100% in recent weeks. This was so sudden there were formal questions posed by the Australian Stock Exchange. However, no answers were provided by the company. This week the valuation dropped “only” twelve percent, most likely due to profit-taking by those taking advantage of the sudden increased value.
Finally, the Stratasys – 3D Systems race remains tight. This week Stratasys remains slightly larger in valuation, and the gap increased somewhat. Stratasys gained almost four percent, while 3D Systems dropped three percent.
Why the difference? It might have something to do with an unusual announcement from Stratasys. Evidently the special shareholder rights regime they instituted during the height of the takeover saga earlier this year was set to expire. The announcement creates a new set of rights, which are designed to tangle up any hostile takeovers.
Basically it states that should any party collect more than 15% of the shares of the company, a series of rules are executed. Among other things, it allows other shareholders to acquire more shares at a nominal price point, and force the buyer to negotiate directly with the Stratasys board of directors. This is what some might call a “poison pill” to discourage unwanted takeovers.
It may be the investors saw this announcement and accordingly rewarded Stratasys with a boost in value this week.
Why would Stratasys issue these new rules? It would seem they expect more hostile takeover bids in the future.
Right on cue, Nano Dimension announced a new campaign to buy out Stratasys shares. More details to follow on Monday.
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.
