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 | 1,547 | +8 |
| 2 | 3D Systems | 1,464 | +54 |
| 3 | Stratasys | 921 | -3 |
| 4 | Protolabs | 910 | -24 |
| 5 | Nano Dimension | 744 | +100 |
| 6 | Velo3D | 638 | +48 |
| 7 | Desktop Metal | 565 | +16 |
| 8 | SLM Solutions | 543 | +10 |
| 9 | Materialise | 537 | -57 |
| 10 | Markforged | 266 | +31 |
| 11 | FATHOM | 153 | -1 |
| 12 | Steakholder Foods | 45 | 0 |
| 13 | Massivit | 43 | -1 |
| 14 | Shapeways | 31 | -3 |
| 15 | Freemelt | 23 | +2 |
| 16 | Titomic | 23 | -1 |
| 17 | voxeljet | 21 | +0 |
| 18 | Sygnis | 11 | +0 |
| 19 | AML3D | 11 | -1 |
| 20 | Sigma Additive Solutions | 11 | 0 |
| 21 | Aurora Labs | 4 | -1 |
| 22 | Tinkerine | 1 | -0 |
| TOTAL | 8,512 | +178 |
This week saw a very slight upward movement of the leaderboard total, with just over two percent gain in valuation among the 3D print companies tracked.
While most companies were flat over the week, there were some interesting movements.
Protolabs slipped from third to fourth place, now behind third place Stratasys. The reason for this slip was that Stratasys dipped slightly less than Protolabs, and the closeness of their valuations allowed Stratasys to leapfrog Protolabs.
Markforged had a very good week, rising over 13% in valuation. There was no official reason for the shift, although the company is slowly recovering from a huge dip that bottomed out in mid-December. While their recent growth has been welcome, the company still has a lot of ground to make up to recover from their all-time high, set two years ago. The company is down around 85% in value since then.
Nano Dimension could be considered the winner of the week with a near 19% gain. The company has been under scrutiny by investors due to a nasty squabble among shareholders, resulting in controversy at their board of directors. However, in recent weeks the company has been trying to set things straight and this week issued a number of interesting press releases.
One release attempted to persuade investors from attending a “special shareholders meeting” called by rebel investors. Nano Dimension believes the meeting was illegal.
Another release described their relationship with a new corporate advisor to assist in “potential transformative acquisitions”. That sounds quite intriguing, and it may be the company goes on an acquisition spree in the near future.
However, the true cause of the bump this week could be the third release, where Nano Dimension announced their US$100M stock buyback is now “in action”. My thought is that money always talks loudest, and that could be what drove the company’s valuation up so high this week.
Materialise dropped almost ten percent in value this week, a substantial dip. This was most likely caused by their latest financials, which apparently did not meet their previous guidance. Investors appropriately reset their valuation of the company. The change dropped Materialise three spots on the leaderboard to ninth position.
Finally, Aurora Labs dropped a whopping 15% this week, most likely on news they intend on raising capital by selling additional shares. They hope to raise AU$1.35M (US$930K), which would obviously dilute current shareholder value and the valuation of correspondingly dropped. However, the company also announced their high-volume metal 3D printing system is set to be released in Q2/Q3 of this year.
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.
