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.
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 first take a look at the major 3D printing companies on this week’s list. I consider these companies “major” because their market valuations are significantly larger than others in the space.
Major Players
| RANK | COMPANY | CAP | CHG |
| 1 | 3D Systems | 3164 | -1139 |
| 2 | Xometry | 3082 | +23 |
| 3 | Desktop Metal | 2399 | -330 |
| 4 | Protolabs | 2393 | -173 |
| 5 | Nano Dimension | 1650 | -159 |
| 6 | Materialise | 1286 | -81 |
| 7 | Stratasys | 1266 | -185 |
| 8 | ExOne | 362 | -73 |
| 9 | Markforged | 223 | NEW |
| TOTAL | 15826 | -264 |
This week saw the introduction of a new entry on our major players list: Markforged. The company has been operation for eight years, being one of the very first to offer 3D printers with the unique ability to use continuous carbon fiber. Parts produced with that material are exceptionally strong, and led to significant growth by the company.
Since then they’ve introduced a line of metal 3D printers to compete with the larger players and have been reasonably successful. The growth they’ve seen in recent years no doubt led to their decision to go public via a SPAC. Sarah interviewed Michael Papish, Vice President of Marketing / Chief Evangelist at Markforged to find out more on the decision to be publicly traded.
I was curious to see the valuation Markforged would have after their first week of trading, and it turns out to be US$223M, enough to place them on our major players list in ninth place. More encouraging is that their stock price has slowly climbed over the two days it’s been available to the public.
I am a bit surprised to see them valued at this level. In the market they compete against Desktop Metal, which also offers inexpensive metal 3D printing equipment. However, Desktop Metal has a far higher valuation, this week at US$2,399M, 10X Markforged’s.
The remainder of those on this list actually had quite a lousy week, while each company’s position in the list remained stable, with one exception. While the markets in general dropped around a percent, most of the major players took significant hits.
3D Systems took the worst of it, with daily stock price drops each day of the week, with the damage being a massive US$1,139M, or 26.5% of their previous week’s value.
They weren’t alone, as Desktop Metal, Stratasys and ExOne all experienced drops in the teens, while Protolabs, Nano Dimension and Materialise saw somewhat lesser drops. The “survivor” of the week seems to be newcomer Xometry, which remained flat. This is likely due to their recent entry, where investor minds still maintain their strategies. Materialise took a much smaller hit than Stratasys, allowing them to leapfrog into sixth place.
Hopefully, next week will be better.
Other Players
| RANK | COMPANY | CAP | CHG |
| 10 | voxeljet | 53 | -26 |
| 11 | ARC Group WW | 33 | +1 |
| 12 | AML3D | 23 | +3 |
| 13 | Aurora Labs | 8 | 0 |
| 14 | Tinkerine | 3 | 0 |
| Massivit | TBD | TBD | |
| TOTAL | 120 | -21 |
[Source: Fabbaloo]
The lesser valued companies tend to have much smaller shifts in their market capitalization because there is far less trading occurring on their stocks. The big money tends to hover around the larger players.
This week saw some unusual ups and downs on this list. voxeljet seemed to have caught the same disease as the major players and dropped a massive 32.5% in value. Meanwhile, AML3D gained almost 18%. At one point during the week, AML3D was actually 27% up, but the market pulled them back somewhat by the end of Friday. Why the jump? It’s likely a combination of their recent deal with Boeing, combined with an announcement of a new research facility in Adelaide.
Note that we are unable to obtain Massivit’s market cap value, as it does not seem to be published, even though they are a publicly traded company on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange.
Upcoming Changes
One notable announcement this week has another 3D print company lining up to be publicly traded via SPAC: FATHOM. If you’re not familiar with FATHOM, it’s a large manufacturing service with multiple locations. Media reports indicate the value of the company could be as much as US$1.5B, which would place them in the middle of our major players list. We have more details on FATHOM’s announcement.
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 now exactly what it is at any moment. The suspected bigger companies include EOS, Carbon, Formlabs and SLM Solutions.
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.
