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.
Let’s first take a look at the major 3D printing companies on this week’s list. I consider these companies “major” because their market valuations are significantly larger than others in the space.
Major Players
| RANK | COMPANY | MARKET CAP (US$) | CHANGE |
| 1 | Desktop Metal | 3,567 | +455 |
| 2 | Protolabs | 3,090 | +71 |
| 3 | 3D Systems | 2,720 | -66 |
| 4 | Nano Dimension | 1,884 | +29 |
| 5 | Materialise | 1,607 | -97 |
| 6 | Stratasys | 1,430 | -50 |
| 7 | ExOne | 515 | -8 |
| TOTAL | 14,812 | +567 |
This week saw a significant move by Desktop Metal to increase the spread between them and other players. The Boston-based company saw a rise of a massive US$455M over last week’s valuation to solidify their lead in the industry.
The other major players came nowhere near Desktop Metal’s change of nearly 15%. Instead they all were slightly up or down, basically flat this week. Protolabs gained 2.4%, while Materialise dropped nearly six percent.
Why did Desktop Metal gain so much this week? There were no specific announcements this week from the company, although last week they announced the certification of 316L stainless steel for their production 3D printer. That alone would not generate the boost seen in their valuation.
My suspicion is that the stock price is simply rebounding. Its value soared shortly after going public, rising to an astonishing US$33.50 in early February. However, profit-taking sellers pushed the price down in subsequent weeks, bottoming out last week at US$11.25. The rebound likely reflects the true market value for the company, rather than the inflated values of February.
Other Players
| RANK | COMPANY | MARKET CAP (US$) | CHANGE |
| 8 | voxeljet | 87 | -3 |
| 9 | ARC Group WW | 22 | -1 |
| 10 | Aurora Labs | 12 | 0 |
| 11 | Tinkerine | 2 | 0 |
| 12 | Robo | 2 | 0 |
| TBD | Massivit | TBD | TBD |
| TOTAL | 14,812 | +567 |
[Source: Fabbaloo]
The lesser valued companies tend to have much smaller shifts in their market capitalization because there is far less trading occurring on their stocks. The big money tends to hover around the larger players.
This week saw similar effects to the major players; overall this group was down 3.24%, with voxeljet leading the descent with a drop of 3.67% in value. Overall a very stable week, price-wise.
Upcoming Changes
The big news this week was the unexpected sudden announcement from Shapeways that they were going to become a public company. Smartly, they’ve chosen to do so via a SPAC (special purpose acquisition company), rather than a formal IPO (initial public offering).
The SPAC is essentially a holding company that’s already placed on a stock market, and they “take over” the private company. In reality, the management of the acquired company (Shapeways in this case) simply becomes the new management and things proceed much as they did before — except the company is publicly traded.
The arrangement Shapeways has made with their SPAC suggests an initial market value of around US$605M. This means I will most likely place them on our “major players” list. However, that’s only the initial value — upon market opening this could rise or fall quite dramatically.
Shapeways will appear on the NYSE under listing “SHPW”. It’s not yet clear when they will appear on the market (Q3 2021 is projected), but they join Markforged and VELO3D as other key 3D print companies that will join our tracker.
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 now 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.
