Which 3D print company is the biggest? [Image by Stefan Keller from Pixabay]
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 | Xometry | 3278 | +196 |
| 2 | 3D Systems | 3229 | +65 |
| 3 | Protolabs | 2389 | -4 |
| 4 | Desktop Metal | 2294 | -105 |
| 5 | Markforged | 1946 | NEW |
| 6 | Nano Dimension | 1598 | -52 |
| 7 | Stratasys | 1271 | +4 |
| 8 | Materialise | 1173 | -113 |
| 9 | ExOne | 364 | +2 |
| TOTAL | 17542 | +1716 |
There’s plenty of movement in this week’s report.
First, let’s get this out of the way: last week’s report seems to have had a significant error. The initial appearance of Markforged on the stock markets was not reported consistently among our data sources. We posted their first week’s market cap at US$223M, as that was the value reported by several sources. The number did seem quite small, however.
I looked deeper into this during the week and found incredibly inconsistent results. Basically, major financial sources online report — and continue to report — three wildly different values for Markforged’s cap.
- Three sites report ~US$225M (which is what we used last week)
- Three other sites report ~US$1550M
- One more site reports “Not Available”
Digging deeper, I went into the SEC Edgar documents to determine exactly how many shares were issued by Markforged, and I believe I’ve figured it out. Markforged actually issued close to 185M shares, and when you compute the market cap the true valuation is near the ~1550M number. That’s what we’ll use going forward, regardless of what some sites report.
After the smoke cleared, we can see that Markforged now lies in fifth place, just below their long-time rival Desktop Metal.
This week saw a change at the top for the first time in quite a while. The new largest public 3D printing company is Xometry! Xometry only recently went public, and by all measures that move has been incredibly successful for them.
Their jump relegates previous leader 3D Systems to second place, albeit by only a few million dollars. Last week 3D Systems saw a dramatic drop, so this is likely more of the same for them, to the benefit of Xometry.
Another change in placement occurred: Desktop Metal, once the lead, has slipped to fourth place as Protolabs has jumped ahead into third place.
Markforged, with their now-hopefully-correct valuation, lands at position five, ahead of Nano Dimension.
Yet another switch took place: Stratasys vaults above Materialise. The two companies have been leapfrogging each other repeatedly lately, so this is more of the same.
Other Players
| RANK | COMPANY | CAP | CHG |
| 10 | voxeljet | 60 | +7 |
| 11 | Arc Group WW | 29 | -3 |
| 12 | AML3D | 22 | -1 |
| 13 | Aurora Labs | 8 | 0 |
| 14 | Tinkerine | 3 | 0 |
| NA | Massivit | TBD | TBD |
| TOTAL | 122 | +2 |
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.
Unlike the major players list, this week saw basically no change in the smaller players list. Voxeljet gained over 13%, while ARC Group WW dropped a little over 10%. Tinkerine dropped 12%, hopefully not due to our story about their recent success.
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
We’re still awaiting additional IPOs to add to our list, as several companies have announced they seek to go public. Shapeways and VELO3D have long been on the list, and are expected to appear in Q3 and “the second half” of 2021, respectively. This week we also learned that Fast Radius is also working towards a public share offering, via the SPAC approach.
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.
