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 | 1,539 | -188 |
| 2 | 3D Systems | 1,410 | -167 |
| 3 | Protolabs | 934 | +37 |
| 4 | Stratasys | 924 | -64 |
| 5 | Nano Dimension | 644 | -80 |
| 6 | Materialise | 594 | -62 |
| 7 | Velo3D | 589 | +39 |
| 8 | Desktop Metal | 549 | -127 |
| 9 | SLM Solutions | 533 | +32 |
| 10 | Markforged | 235 | -47 |
| 11 | FATHOM | 155 | -27 |
| 12 | Steakholder Foods | 45 | 0 |
| 13 | Massivit | 44 | -5 |
| 14 | Shapeways | 34 | -2 |
| 15 | Titomic | 24 | +2 |
| 16 | voxeljet | 21 | +1 |
| 17 | Freemelt | 21 | -1 |
| 18 | AML3D | 12 | +1 |
| 19 | Sygnis | 11 | -1 |
| 20 | Sigma Additive Solutions | 11 | 0 |
| 21 | Aurora Labs | 4 | -0 |
| 22 | Tinkerine | 1 | -0 |
| TOTAL | 8,334 | -660 |
This week saw saw a reversal of last week’s gains, unfortunately. That week the leaderboard gained over US$700M, but this week the total dropped by US$660M. That’s a seven percent drop — up, then down again.
However, there was much variance among the companies on the leaderboard, with many valuations heading downward, and a few heading upwards.
On the positive side I point to Velo3D, which gained a notable seven percent in value. This is quite interesting, given that the leaderboard on average dropped seven percent. That’s equivalent to a 14% rise against the average.
Why the gain? This week Velo3D released their 2022 financials, which were quite positive. Their 2022 revenue was US$80M, with margin in the 3-4% range. The revenues were actually higher than their previously issued guidance, resulting in a pleasant surprise for investors and a bump to their valuation.
Another winner this week was Protolabs, which gained four percent and rose into third place on the leaderboard. The company issued their financials for 2022 this week, and reported record revenues of almost half a billion dollars, and a surprising gain of almost 50% growth for their Hubs (formerly 3D Hubs) line of business. That bodes well, as it firmly aligns Protolabs with the company in the top position on the leaderboard, Xometry.
In addition, Protolabs announced an increase to their stock buy-back program, which went from US$200M to US$250M. This takes more shares off the market, and thus boosts the value of the available shares. That’s why Protolabs jumped up this week.
Metal 3D printer manufacturer SLM Solutions jumped up six percent on their financial results from 2022. They reported revenue to be something near 40% higher than 2021, far higher than they had forecasted previously. Again, a surprise for investors and a valuation bump.
On the other side of the ledger, several companies saw steep declines in excess of the average decline this week.
Leading that group was Desktop Metal, which dropped in value almost 19%. The company issued no official announcements, but should be releasing their 2022 results soon. However, it could be that investors may have been having second thoughts about the company’s move last week to drastically cut costs in advance of the financial release. Whatever the reason, Desktop Metal slipped two spots on the leaderboard.
Nano Dimension also slipped, this week by eleven percent. Their only announcement this week was regarding a new patent, which should be a positive signal. However, investors apparently thought otherwise, perhaps thinking deeper about the strange corporate maneuvers the company has been recently undergoing at the board level.
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.
