Which 3D print company is the biggest this week? [Image by Stefan Keller from Pixabay]
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 | 3D Systems | 2370 | +76 |
| 2 | Xometry | 2089 | +191 |
| 3 | Stratasys | 1659 | +115 |
| 4 | Protolabs | 1554 | +186 |
| 5 | Velo3D | 1288 | +132 |
| 6 | Desktop Metal | 1266 | +68 |
| 7 | Materialise | 1187 | +17 |
| 8 | FATHOM | 1074 | -61 |
| 9 | Nano Dimension | 943 | +17 |
| 10 | Markforged | 825 | -56 |
| 11 | SLM Solutions | 391 | +28 |
| 12 | Shapeways | 165 | +17 |
| 13 | Massivit | 106 | +8 |
| 14 | MeaTech 3D | 82 | -3 |
| 15 | voxeljet | 49 | +3 |
| 16 | Freemelt | 34 | -9 |
| 17 | Sigma Labs | 22 | -2 |
| 18 | Sygnis | 12 | 0 |
| 19 | Aurora Labs | 11 | 0 |
| 20 | AML3D | 9 | -1 |
| 21 | Tinkerine | 2 | 0 |
| TOTAL | 15137 | +727 |
This week saw gains week over week, but on Friday most companies suffered losses that dampened their weekly gain. These were caused by general market fears over a Ukrainian war, with US President Biden suggesting Russia could invade “within days”.
Several companies saw gains exceeding ten percent over the week, with the leader being Protolabs. They announced financial results that beat market expectations, thus causing their stock value to rise strongly on Friday. In other words, the company was suddenly worth more than everyone expected.
Another strong gainer was Xometry, which grew over ten percent in value. My suspicion is that last week’s announcement of a US$250 offering caused the stock price to dip slightly, while a subsequent announcement of a powerful new cloud-based software tool did the opposite. The tool is a way for the company to integrate all of their recent acquisitions into a single service portal, making it easier to do business with them.
Velo3D also gained well over eleven percent. Again, no specific news here, but after weeks of declining value it’s not surprising to see the company jump up a bit. They have an outstanding offering in the metal 3D printing area, and it should be recognized.
Shapeways gained almost twelve percent over the week, seemingly for no particular reason. This company’s valuation has been dropping steadily since it went public at well over US$400M. Today its valuation is US$165M, so perhaps the market has found a stable valuation level.
Upcoming Changes
We are still awaiting the appearance on the market of one more 3D print company: 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.
However, this week there was a surprise announcement from Essentium and their SPAC partner, Atlantic Coastal Acquisition Corporation. Evidently the two companies have jointly decided not to pursue their prior strategy. This means that Essentium will not enter the stock market as expected, but will likely use some alternative means to do so. We will attempt to find out more on this ongoing story.
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.
