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 | 1,476 | -158 |
| 2 | Stratasys | 964 | -24 |
| 3 | Protolabs | 935 | -71 |
| 4 | 3D Systems | 750 | -100 |
| 5 | Nano Dimension | 585 | -23 |
| 6 | Materialise | 359 | -29 |
| 7 | Desktop Metal | 202 | -44 |
| 8 | Markforged | 144 | -20 |
| 9 | Velo3D | 88 | +8 |
| 10 | Massivit | 32 | -1 |
| 11 | FATHOM | 32 | +1 |
| 12 | Titomic | 30 | +3 |
| 13 | Freemelt | 22 | +1 |
| 14 | AML3D | 16 | +1 |
| 15 | Steakholder Foods | 14 | -0 |
| 16 | Shapeways | 13 | -3 |
| 17 | voxeljet | 11 | -0 |
| 18 | Aurora Labs | 6 | +0 |
| 19 | Sygnis | 5 | -0 |
| 20 | Sigma Additive Solutions | 4 | +1 |
| TOTAL | 5,686 | -458 |
This week saw significant drops in valuation for almost every company on the leaderboard. The markets overall fell 2-4 percent, and as usual the tech-heavy 3D print companies suffered more, with the leaderboard total falling 7.5%.
Most companies fell approximately that percent, but there were some interesting deviations.
Stratasys fell only 2.5%, possibly because of increased attention due to the latest takeover bid by Nano Dimension, which for some unexplainable reason won’t give up. While their latest bid is not terrific, and actually quite a bit worse than their prior bids, it’s unlikely to proceed. However, the presence of the bid perhaps gave investors a reason to boost (or not drop) the stock very much.
The small drop enabled Stratasys to take second place on the leaderboard, relegating Protolabs to third. 3D Systems, a former but not current bidder for Stratasys, fell a whopping twelve percent this week. Nano Dimension fell about four percent.
Desktop Metal took an 18% hit this week. While there was no official news driving this shift, it could be that investors are becoming wary of the company as it has yet to release a strategic plan after the cancellation of their merger with Stratasys.
Shapeways dropped a huge 17% this week, leaving their total valuation around US$13M. This is an unbelievable loss of value, considering their value on the leaderboard in October 2021 was US$564M. That’s a 98% loss of value, and is perhaps one of the reasons many VC investors have soured on 3D printing companies. The current value of Shapeways is so low they could easily be acquired by many of the other companies, but that’s not likely to occur. It is puzzling, however, why Shapeways cannot seem to catch up with Protolabs or Xometry, which are both in pretty much the same business and are far more highly valued.
Finally, we have Titomic. The Australian metal 3D printing company ROSE ten percent this week, bucking the trend. This company has been subject to seemingly fantastic rises in value, week after week. The trend continues this week, and it’s unclear what’s going on.
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.
