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 | 1,727 | +179 |
| 2 | 3D Systems | 1,577 | +165 |
| 3 | Stratasys | 988 | +31 |
| 4 | Protolabs | 897 | +98 |
| 5 | Nano Dimension | 723 | -13 |
| 6 | Desktop Metal | 676 | +89 |
| 7 | Materialise | 656 | +65 |
| 8 | Velo3D | 550 | +132 |
| 9 | SLM Solutions | 501 | -19 |
| 10 | Markforged | 281 | +10 |
| 11 | FATHOM | 182 | -1 |
| 12 | Massivit | 49 | +4 |
| 13 | Steakholder Foods | 45 | 0 |
| 14 | Shapeways | 36 | +7 |
| 15 | Titomic | 22 | -2 |
| 16 | Freemelt | 22 | -1 |
| 17 | voxeljet | 21 | +2 |
| 18 | Sygnis | 12 | +1 |
| 19 | AML3D | 11 | +2 |
| 20 | Sigma Additive Solutions | 11 | 0 |
| 21 | Aurora Labs | 5 | +0 |
| 22 | Tinkerine | 1 | +0 |
| TOTAL | 8,993 | +749 |
This week saw a very healthy rise on the leaderboard, to the tune of nine percent. A good chunk of that rise was due to the general market. The NASDAQ rose four percent, and of course the 3D print group exaggerated that by rising more than twice that amount. It’s a volatile segment, to be sure.
Most companies on the leaderboard rose between three and eleven percent, great news all around. However, there were a few divergent companies.
The most notable this week had to be Velo3D, which saw its value rise an unbelievable 31%. As usual, there were no official announcements from the company to drive this change in value. However, if one looks at the company’s long term price trend, you can see that the recent rise is basically a slow recovery to where the valuation was at some months ago. For reasons unbeknownst to me, Velo3D has been subject to wild variations in valuation for months. The company has outstanding metal 3D printing equipment used by leading companies, and there has been little reason for the volatility.
Another notable shift this week as from Desktop Metal, which rose over 15% in value, higher than the leaderboard average. This is no doubt an investor reaction to the company’s blockbuster announcement this week of a massive US$50M series of cuts and closures.
The cuts were unfortunate, but likely required. The company had acquired a number of 3D print companies, and consolidations are the rule for such activity. The big question was whether investors saw the cuts as positive or negative. Clearly, the result was seen in a good light.
A very curious shift came from Shapeways, which unexpectedly rose almost 24% this week. This is a very significant change for the company, which, after having a stellar initial valuation, has steadily dropped for many months. The company at one point carried a valuation of only six percent of its initial value, according to our long-term valuation analysis.
Shapeways did not issue any official announcements that might have caused this effect. In fact, the company’s website does not have ANY recent press releases, although some were released in other places. The most recent financial press release on their website is from May, 2022. This is quite odd, to say the least.
It may be that Shapeways was caught up in the general market increases this week, but their valuation jump was significantly higher. One thought is that it may be that Shapeways has finally been recognized by investors as having shifted towards the industrial market. Players in that space are valued far higher than Shapeways, so perhaps this is a bit of a catch up.
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.
