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$) | CHANGE |
| 1 | Desktop Metal | 2,853 | -714 |
| 2 | Protolabs | 2,808 | -288 |
| 3 | 3D Systems | 2,399 | -328 |
| 4 | Nano Dimension | 1,660 | -218 |
| 5 | Materialise | 1,451 | -170 |
| 6 | Stratasys | 1,273 | -165 |
| 7 | ExOne | 452 | -60 |
| TOTAL | 12,897 | -1,943 |
This week saw a massive drop in value for all companies on our leaderboard, but all companies kept their ranking relative to each other. While most of the companies lost around 10% of their market value over the week, the biggest drop was for Desktop Metal, the current market cap champion.
That company dropped almost exactly 20% in value over the past week, substantially more than the others. This is quite curious, given that they announced a revolutionary new wood-based 3D printer this week, which I believe could attract considerable business.
Could this drop be a market effect where all stocks were driven down by the market at large?
On the week, the DJIA and the S&P500 were up a few percent. However, the NASDAQ, an exchange hosting many tech companies, dropped a couple of percent. On the other hand, that’s a lot less than the damage that struck 3D printing stocks this week. It seems that investors have soured on 3D printing, at least for last week.
Other Players
| RANK | COMPANY | MARKET CAP (US$) | CHANGE |
| 8 | voxeljet | 80 | -7 |
| 9 | ARC Group WW | 24 | 2 |
| 10 | Aurora Labs | 10 | -3 |
| 11 | Tinkerine | 2 | 0 |
| 12 | Robo | TBD | TBD |
| TBD | Massivit | TBD | TBD |
| TOTAL | 116 | -8 |
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 a mixed bag of results. voxeljet dropped eight percent, similar to the big players, but ARC Group WW gained eight percent. Aurora Labs dropped a significant 22%, and it’s not clear why. This seems to be a troubled week on the stock market.
Robo hasn’t seen any trading for a while, so their stats are unclear for the week.
Upcoming Changes
We’re anxiously awaiting the arrival of not one, but three new stocks to our list, Markforged, VELO3D and Shapeways. These three have officially announced their intent to go public, and have even released their stock ticker symbols (MKFG, VLD, and SHPW, respectively.)
I’ve been thinking about other companies that might at any time announce their intent to hit the stock market. Two companies in particular are first in my mind, and they are: Formlabs and Carbon.
Both of these companies are now well-established with worldwide operations and are well-funded privately. It’s likely their investors will at some point want a payback of their investment, and the way to do so eventually is to go onto the stock market at a multiple of their original private investments.
I suspect that both companies would immediately make the Major Players list, and possibly near the top.
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.
