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 | 1,785 | +52 |
| 2 | 3D Systems | 1,491 | +102 |
| 3 | Stratasys | 1,353 | +56 |
| 4 | Protolabs | 1,345 | +19 |
| 5 | Nano Dimension | 847 | -15 |
| 6 | Materialise | 829 | -9 |
| 7 | Desktop Metal | 668 | -94 |
| 8 | Velo3D | 590 | +53 |
| 9 | FATHOM | 580 | +47 |
| 10 | Markforged | 412 | +30 |
| 11 | SLM Solutions | 285 | +2 |
| 12 | Massivit | 82 | +1 |
| 13 | Freemelt | 44 | +6 |
| 14 | Meatech 3D | 42 | -2 |
| 15 | Shapeways | 42 | -1 |
| 16 | Fast Radius | 41 | -3 |
| 17 | voxeljet | 28 | -0 |
| 18 | Sigma Additive Solutions | 11 | 0 |
| 19 | Sygnis | 11 | +1 |
| 20 | AML3D | 10 | +2 |
| 21 | Aurora Labs | 4 | -0 |
| 22 | Tinkerine | 2 | +0 |
| TOTAL | 10,502 | +246 |
This week saw modest gains among most 3D print companies, as valuations seemed to match the overall market, which rose between 2-5% depending on which market you look at. This is quite different from what we usually see: an exaggerated response from 3D print investors, making the leaderboard soar far higher — or sink far lower — than the markets. This week, 3D printing apparently was the same as everything else.
That said, a couple of companies had big swings. In the upward direction was AML3D, which soared an astonishing 26% in value this week. The news this week related to the company “starting” the process of obtaining ISO 9100 certification. While that’s positive, it certainly doesn’t deserve a 26% reward. My suspicion here is that once again, earlier news is finally catching up to investors. AML3D had announced plans to produce metal parts for Boeing a few weeks ago, and at the time I thought that was big news. It wasn’t then, but apparently was this week instead.
On the other side of the ledger was Desktop Metal, whose value dropped by over twelve percent this week. While the company did announce some good news about a new nickel alloy being qualified, they had scheduled their Q2 results to be announced on August 8th. It may be that investors may have a feeling about these upcoming results and are selling some of their Desktop Metal holdings. On the other hand, they might be completely wrong. Let’s wait and see what the company releases in August.
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.
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.
