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 | Protolabs | 761 | -11 |
| 2 | Xometry | 615 | -3 |
| 3 | Stratasys | 578 | -9 |
| 4 | Nano Dimension | 489 | -22 |
| 5 | 3D Systems | 470 | +1 |
| 6 | Materialise | 297 | -5 |
| 7 | Desktop Metal | 136 | +10 |
| 8 | Markforged | 87 | -7 |
| 9 | Titomic | 53 | -3 |
| 10 | Velo3D | 26 | -3 |
| 11 | Aurora Labs | 20 | -1 |
| 12 | Massivit | 19 | -5 |
| 13 | AML3D | 16 | +1 |
| 14 | Freemelt | 10 | -1 |
| 15 | Steakholder Foods | 9 | -1 |
| 16 | Shapeways | 7 | -1 |
| 17 | Sygnis | 4 | -0 |
| TOTAL | 3,598 | -59 |
This week saw the markets up slightly in general, but our leaderboard somehow managed to drop slightly instead. Normally the 3D print companies tend to exaggerate overall trends, but that has not been the case recently. On the week, the leaderboard total fell by about one percent.
Most companies dropped this week, with a couple of exceptions. One was Desktop Metal, which grew over 7.5% in value this week. At the midpoint of this past week Desktop Metal’s stock price leapt upwards, almost a 50% sudden spike. The previous day the company announced two items: the qualification of platinum metal for their production binder jet system; and a partnership with BEGA to 3D print aluminum lighting components.
It’s not clear if these news items caused the jump, as they don’t seem particularly spectacular. However, both open up many new market possibilities for the company. The company’s stock price quickly cooled down, however, and assumed its current level, which is higher than last week.
AML3D also caught a boost of over three percent, and this seems to be continuing their upward trend. My suspicion is that the company is becoming more well known as a result of their repeated announcements of metal print deals with military organizations.
That’s enough of the good news. In fact, that’s the only good news on the leaderboard this week. The rest of the companies were flat or negative.
Velo3D trimmed its value by another ten percent, continuing the trend triggered by their reverse stock split of the other week. Presumably the valuation will stabilize at some point soon.
Shapeways, now valued at under US$7M, fell another 14% this week. The company has negotiated the sale of a major chunk of their software platform to company executives, so it is unclear how this will turn out. Investors don’t seem to be particularly happy, regardless.
Nano Dimension fell over four percent this week, with rival Stratasys falling 1.5%, making the gap between the two a bit wider at US$89M. Meanwhile, 3D Systems rose slightly to end up only US$19M behind Nano Dimension.
Finally, the leaderboard total this week is a mere US$3.6B. This is by far the lowest leaderboard total we’ve seen since we started tracking things way back in Spring of 2021, when the initial total was US$18.4B. The peak total occurred in November 2021, when it hit US$20.3B.
Today’s diminishing total represents a horrendous decline in value of over 82%, or almost US$17B lost. That alone shows why investors have soured on 3D print companies: they have definitely not shown the ability to grow the investments.
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.
