Once again we take a look at the valuations of the major 3D printing companies over the past week.
It may be Christmas today, but the markets never sleep, and we do this post every Sunday, rain or shine.
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 | 1,402 | -54 |
| 2 | 3D Systems | 972 | -113 |
| 3 | Stratasys | 765 | -39 |
| 4 | Protolabs | 671 | -53 |
| 5 | Nano Dimension | 620 | 0 |
| 6 | Materialise | 511 | -30 |
| 7 | SLM Solutions | 472 | -8 |
| 8 | Desktop Metal | 387 | -54 |
| 9 | Velo3D | 352 | +39 |
| 10 | Markforged | 210 | +51 |
| 11 | FATHOM | 189 | -92 |
| 12 | Massivit | 52 | -0 |
| 13 | Steakholder Foods | 45 | 0 |
| 14 | Shapeways | 28 | +2 |
| 15 | Titomic | 22 | +0 |
| 16 | Freemelt | 22 | -2 |
| 17 | voxeljet | 19 | +0 |
| 18 | Sygnis | 11 | -0 |
| 19 | Sigma Additive Solutions | 11 | 0 |
| 20 | AML3D | 10 | +1 |
| 21 | Aurora Labs | 4 | +1 |
| 22 | Tinkerine | 1 | +0 |
| TOTAL | 6,777 | -352 |
This week saw was yet another terrible week for 3D print-related companies, as well as many others in the publicly traded domain. While the markets in general were flattish, tech stocks suffered. The NASDAQ in particular dropped somewhat.
However, our leaderboard companies suffered far worse fates in general, with the leaderboard total value dropping by a massive five percent this week. To put that in perspective, that would take the value of all public 3D print companies to zero in a few months. That won’t happen, but shows the market sentiment here.
Perhaps the most surprising change this week was from Markforged, which rose a massive 33% in value. While this may seem huge, it’s also a counter-reaction to last week’s drop of 15%. Regardless of these week-to-week lurches, the company’s valuation has been more or less steadily dropping for quite some time. A year ago Markforged’s valuation was over US$1B. In its history of trading, it topped out on our leaderboard at just under US$2B in August 2021. Now the company’s value is only US$210M, an 89% drop from their peak.
Another company seeing a huge rise this week was Velo3D. The metal 3D printer manufacturer’s valuation rose by a very healthy 12.5% this week. Why the big jump? Honestly, I have no idea, and I’ve almost given up trying to figure out Velo3D. The company’s valuation jumps up and down for no apparent reason from week to week without any seeming relationship to news or the movement of other 3D print companies.
On the other side of the ledger we have FATHOM, a manufacturing service that heavily uses 3D printing. This week they did the opposite of Markforged, dropping in value by 33%. That’s quite surprising, given last week they also dropped 21% in value. Again similar to Markforged, FATHOM was valued at around US$1.4B a couple of weeks after they started trading. Today, their value is 85% lower.
Towards the bottom of the leaderboard, Aurora Labs posted an 18% gain in value this week, likely on news that their process for 3D printing metal at very high throughput is nearing the award of a patent from from the USPTO. Aurora Labs said:
“This will complete Aurora Lab’s large format multi-layer, printer patent coverage for its MCP technology across major global jurisdictions, including Australia, China, Japan, Germany, France, and Great Britain.”
While huge jumps like this occur (in both directions) in small cap companies such as Aurora Labs, I’m wondering what this company will do once they get into major production with clients.
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.
