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
3D printing valuation leaderboard (in US$M) [Source: Fabbaloo]
This week saw perhaps the flattest week since the launch of our leaderboard. The markets in general were up/down half a percent, and the leaderboard moved very slightly upwards: 0.32%. Normally the tech-heavy 3D print companies exaggerate the overall market trends, and I suppose they did so again this week by being “even flatter”.
That said, there were a couple of companies that made some moves in their valuations.
One was Nano Dimension, which shot upwards over seven percent this week. The company’s valuation had been dribbling downwards ever since they announced a resumption in their unending quest to acquire Stratasys. However, it appears that trend bottomed out this week, and their stock price rallied and soared upwards.
The rally likely doesn’t have anything to do their announcement of a new shareholder rights plan on the 25th — the rise was already underway at that time. The rights program is intended to give the company’s board more time in the event another party acquires more than 10% of their shares. It’s basically insurance against a hostile takeover in the market.
But is that something they are expecting?
Velo3D’s valuation rose sharply this week, almost nine percent. This follows several weeks of significant valuation declines, mostly as a result of the sudden departure of founder and CEO Benny Buller.
The rise seems to be coincident to the company’s announcement of four “key strategic priorities”, and US$12M in new orders certainly helped as well.
The priorities include:
- Enhance the quality of newly manufactured Sapphire printers
- Ensure the success of customers in the field
- Increase revenue visibly through bookings growth
- Improve margins and cash flow
They also say they are on track to reduce expenses by 40% by the end of first quarter, which is also good news for the valuation. New CEO Brad Kreger seems to be taking the reins and this latest announcement seems to have stopped the valuation declines.
Markforged suffered a decline of over twelve percent this week, but while that may seem significant, it is just “noise” in the big scheme of things, as you can see in the six month chart above. The company has faced challenges with investors, as have many companies that have taken VC investments. The issue is that the path to major growth and profitability proportionate to the investment has become less clear in the past two years. Markforged is not alone in this situation.
Titomic fell eleven percent this week, continuing the weekly declines after a spectacular and mysterious sudden rise a month ago. Evidently investors are still taking profits.
Shapeways jumped 13%, which is quite significant for the company. This could be due to their announcement of a 100% year-over-year improvement in their automotive business.
Finally, the gap between 3D Systems and Stratasys is closing slightly this week. Stratasys leads by 37%, slightly less than last week. Interestingly, Nano Dimension is now valued only twelve percent less than 3D Systems.
Upcoming Changes
BigRep announced plans to go public via the SPAC approach, so we will soon see them appear on the leaderboard.
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.
