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.
There’s a bit of a change in this week’s leaderboard, or rather there is one instead of two. Previously, we split the companies into two groups, Major and Smaller Players. When this report was launched, the difference between the two categories was quite obvious: the major players were enormously larger than the smaller group, some of which are literally penny stocks.
That set our leaderboard strategy in place, but in recent weeks there’s been significant changes. Some of the so-called “smaller players” have been growing substantially, while a few of the larger players have diminished in value. Rather than swapping companies between lists from week to week, we’ve decided to merge it all together into one, single definitive leaderboard listing all known publicly-traded 3D print-related companies where 3D printing is a major component of their business operations.
Let’s take a look at the new leaderboard 3D printing companies for this week.
3D Printing Leaderboard
| RANK | COMPANY | CAP | CHG |
| 1 | 3D Systems | 2712 | -183 |
| 2 | Xometry | 1927 | -315 |
| 3 | Desktop Metal | 1770 | -277 |
| 4 | VELO3D | 1595 | -476 |
| 5 | Stratasys | 1586 | -182 |
| 6 | Protolabs | 1352 | -48 |
| 7 | Materialise | 1269 | -105 |
| 8 | Markforged | 1097 | -197 |
| 9 | Nano Dimension | 1055 | -184 |
| 10 | SLM Solutions | 414 | +20 |
| 11 | Shapeways | 174 | -60 |
| 12 | Massivit | 116 | +6 |
| 13 | MeaTech 3D | 82 | +3 |
| 14 | voxeljet | 49 | -6 |
| 15 | Aurora Labs | 14 | 0 |
| 16 | AML3D | 11 | -1 |
| 17 | Tinkerine | 2 | 0 |
| TOTAL | 15224 | -1734 |
This week saw huge drops in valuations for almost every company we’re tracking. In a large part this is due to the larger forces in the market reacting to new COVID-19 fears and other factors.
Near the top of the list, VELO3D lost an astonishing 23% of their valuation this week. This is not due to any particular news from the company, but instead is likely a combination of overall market factors and a bit of a correction as they company’s value has jumped substantially over the past couple of weeks. The drop shifts them from third to fourth position, while Desktop Metal moves up to third.
Protolabs lost “only” 3.4%, perhaps because their value had been depressed for a while, giving it a bit of a cushion against this week’s terrible downward wave.
Most other players lost between 5-15 percent of their value, which is significant. One that moved more than that was Shapeways.
Shapeways, a newcomer to the trading floor, has had a rough time in recent weeks on the stock market. As you can see in this chart that represents their stock value from the beginning of trading on September 30th, it’s been mostly a downward slide. Today they’re worth only about half of their opening day value, and a third of October’s value.
Why the dramatic and ongoing slide? It may be that initial interest in Shapeways might have benefited from the company’s long reputation in the 3D print world — but that was mostly as a provider of services to smaller players and individuals during periods of high consumer interest. However, these days Shapeways has shifted their business towards industry, and that means they are competing against several very established alternative services. It may be that investors are realizing that Shapeways is actually in a more competitive environment than they had believed.
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.
Essentium’s entry was not unsurprising. They were among two companies we felt would most likely enter the trading market, the other being Carbon, who have not announced any plans as of this writing.
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.
