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 | 1,548 | +296 |
| 2 | 3D Systems | 1,411 | +172 |
| 3 | Stratasys | 957 | +29 |
| 4 | Protolabs | 798 | +27 |
| 5 | Nano Dimension | 736 | +98 |
| 6 | Materialise | 591 | +3 |
| 7 | Desktop Metal | 588 | -6 |
| 8 | SLM Solutions | 520 | +6 |
| 9 | Velo3D | 418 | -4 |
| 10 | Markforged | 272 | -6 |
| 11 | FATHOM | 183 | -7 |
| 12 | Massivit | 46 | -2 |
| 13 | Steakholder Foods | 45 | 0 |
| 14 | Shapeways | 29 | +0 |
| 15 | Titomic | 25 | +1 |
| 16 | Freemelt | 23 | +0 |
| 17 | voxeljet | 19 | +0 |
| 18 | Sygnis | 11 | -1 |
| 19 | Sigma Additive Solutions | 11 | 0 |
| 20 | AML3D | 9 | +0 |
| 21 | Aurora Labs | 4 | -0 |
| 22 | Tinkerine | 1 | +0 |
| TOTAL | 8,245 | +606 |
This was a good week, with the leaderboard rising by a very healthy eight percent. This is particularly welcome after month of a downward trajectory. The reason for this bump was mostly due to upward drag from general market conditions, which has been trending up.
As a result of these conditions, you’d think the companies on the leaderboard generally saw increases — but that wasn’t exactly the case. Most companies had a flat week, with valuation changes near zero.
It turns out there were big changes in a few companies at the top of the leaderboard, and percentages at those positions yield big absolute changes in valuation. That’s why the leaderboard total shifted so much.
The biggest shift upwards was from our leader, Xometry, whose value rocketed up a gigantic 24%.
What’s the reason for this change? I think there are two things at play. First, the company’s valuation has been trending down, so this could be considered a bit of a bounce-back in a friendly market.
However, Xometry also announced a couple of notable developments during the week. First, they revealed a big expansion in Europe to the UK, which could represent significant new value. Secondly, they released the results of a survey that showed significant CEO interest in the type of services provided by Xometry. It’s possible that investors trolling the 3D space may have looked at Xometry, saw the expansion announcement and read the survey to attract their interest.
Two other companies, 3D Systems and Nano Dimension, saw increases of 14% and 15%, respectively.
3D Systems did not issue any specific news to warrant the increase in value, but they are nearing the release of their 2022 financial results. It may be that some investors are betting on good results, hence the abrupt increase in value.
The Nano Dimension story is a bit more complex. The company has been swirling in controversy in recent months with a struggle for control of the company. This has affected their valuation, in spite of some interesting advances.
This week the company issued a number of press releases that no doubt affected the valuation change. Most important was no doubt the 2022 annual results, which showed a very significant boost in revenues. The US$44M they collected during 2022 was apparently 316% above 2021 results.
Nano Dimension described the situation:
“Over the last year or so, while multiple companies saw the growth of their business challenged, Nano Dimension’s revenues grew over 300%.
During that time, the wider stock market caused stock prices across the 3D printing industry to lose value faster than Nano Dimension’s share price. However, broader market changes and sector specific pressure, has left the Company’s stock value lower than its cash value per share. As a result, investors with a short term focus are seeking to break up the Company’s business and liquidate its cash for their own business or personal needs, without regard for the investment required to generate value for the Company’s over one hundred thousand shareholders or for its over 500 employees.”
This situation has a group of shareholders wishing to cash in, but in the release Nano Dimension stated they are taking further action against a takeover possibility. They explain:
“Ever committed to executing on its business plan and creating notable shareholder value, Nano Dimension is considering various legal measures in order to protect itself from a takeover, as long as it is a target, by applying value protection mechanisms that will reduce the incentive for destructive offers and will allow investors to easily differentiate between legitimate offers aimed at improving the Company’s value and business prospects from those that merely seek to fill the pockets of shady hedge funds.”
Evidently this was good news to Nano Dimension investors.
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.
