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 | 1,443 | +41 |
| 2 | 3D Systems | 971 | -1 |
| 3 | Stratasys | 792 | +27 |
| 4 | Protolabs | 692 | +21 |
| 5 | Nano Dimension | 592 | -28 |
| 6 | Materialise | 520 | +9 |
| 7 | SLM Solutions | 458 | -15 |
| 8 | Desktop Metal | 432 | +44 |
| 9 | Velo3D | 334 | -19 |
| 10 | Markforged | 225 | +16 |
| 11 | FATHOM | 179 | -9 |
| 12 | Massivit | 48 | -4 |
| 13 | Steakholder Foods | 45 | 0 |
| 14 | Shapeways | 27 | -1 |
| 15 | Titomic | 25 | +3 |
| 16 | Freemelt | 25 | +3 |
| 17 | voxeljet | 19 | +0 |
| 18 | Sygnis | 12 | +0 |
| 19 | Sigma Additive Solutions | 11 | 0 |
| 20 | AML3D | 10 | +0 |
| 21 | Aurora Labs | 4 | -0 |
| 22 | Tinkerine | 1 | +0 |
| TOTAL | 6,863 | +86 |
This week saw perhaps the flattest week in the history of this leaderboard. The leaderboard total was positive, gaining a little over one percent in total value. In some ways this is unsurprising, as the holiday period doesn’t tend to generate big surprises in the financial markets. Most companies saw rises or falls in the 3-5% range, not very much at all.
There were a couple of exceptions to this trend.
Titomic and Freemelt both saw valuation rises exceeding ten percent, good news for them. Neither company published any particular news that would cause this shift, nor any news at all. My suspicion here is that both of these are in the small-cap stock range, which is subject to lots of volatility. Sometimes this volatility is generated by automated trading, and due to their relatively small size, can have a greater effect.
One more thing. As this is the last report for 2022, it is appropriate to compare this week with that of the beginning of 2022.
The comparison is definitely not pretty.
Our report from the first week of January 2022 had a leaderboard total of US$15.8B. This week it is only US$6.8B, a drop of 57% in value. Even worse, that January report had three fewer companies on it. 2022 was not a good year for investments in 3D printing. In fact, it may have been one of the worst in history.
That pattern held among individual companies, with many suffering massive losses in value. Here’s the magnitude of the losses for selected companies:
| COMPANY | JAN22 | JAN23 | CHG | PCT |
| Xometry | 2,468 | 1,443 | -1,025 | -42% |
| 3D Systems | 2,547 | 971 | -1,577 | -62% |
| Stratasys | 1,559 | 792 | -767 | -49% |
| Protolabs | 1,439 | 692 | -747 | -52% |
| Nano Dimension | 948 | 592 | -356 | -38% |
| Materialise | 1,283 | 520 | -763 | -59% |
| SLM Solutions | 417 | 457 | +41 | 10% |
| Desktop Metal | 1,406 | 432 | -974 | -69% |
| Velo3D | 1,141 | 334 | -807 | -71% |
| Markforged | 1,005 | 225 | -780 | -78% |
| FATHOM | 1,109 | 179 | -930 | -84% |
As you can see, all the major 3D print players lost significant value, with one notable exception: SLM Solutions actually gained ten percent in value over 2022. That’s quite impressive in the midst of significantly down markets.
What will happen in 2023? We’ll soon find out.
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.
