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 | 3D Systems | 1,238 | -45 |
| 2 | Stratasys | 1,178 | -27 |
| 3 | Xometry | 1,085 | +49 |
| 4 | Protolabs | 908 | -13 |
| 5 | Desktop Metal | 666 | -45 |
| 6 | SLM Solutions | 647 | +9 |
| 7 | Nano Dimension | 636 | +28 |
| 8 | Materialise | 453 | -115 |
| 9 | Velo3D | 370 | +25 |
| 10 | Markforged | 216 | +27 |
| 11 | FATHOM | 50 | -4 |
| 12 | Steakholder Foods | 45 | 0 |
| 13 | Massivit | 36 | +1 |
| 14 | Shapeways | 22 | -2 |
| 15 | Freemelt | 21 | +0 |
| 16 | voxeljet | 18 | +2 |
| 17 | Sigma Additive Solutions | 11 | 0 |
| 18 | AML3D | 9 | -1 |
| 19 | Titomic | 8 | -2 |
| 20 | Sygnis | 8 | -0 |
| 21 | Aurora Labs | 4 | -1 |
| TOTAL | 7,626 | -114 |
This week saw a healthy rise in the overall markets, but strangely this wasn’t reflected onto the 3D printing companies. Normally these tech companies exaggerate larger trends, but somehow that wasn’t the case this week. However, there is likely a reason for this, which you will see shortly.
In terms of gains, Markforged won the week with a near 15% rise in value. What was the cause for this shift? It seems the only news of note from the company was a change at the board of director level. A new board member was added, and the chair was added to the executive compensation committee. However, long time board member Kevin Hartz apparently resigned from the board. Markforged explained:
“Kevin Hartz announced his resignation and amicable departure from the Board of Directors.”
Markforged curiously added this explicit statement:
“Hartz’s departure is not related to any disagreements concerning operating, accounting or financial reporting matters.”
That seems to be a rather odd item to add to what should be a routine announcement. Then, coincidentally, the stock price rose 15%. Perhaps there is more to the story here, but I know nothing of it. In any case, it’s good news this week for Markforged.
On the other side of the ledger, we have Materialise, which sunk over 20% in value this week. The company held its annual general meeting, at which a number of directors were named to board positions. That does not seem controversial at all, and a quick review of their June investor presentation doesn’t show anything amiss in their financials as far as I can tell. In fact, the company seems to be recovering well from the impact of the pandemic.
What happened with the companies involved in the ongoing corporate takeover battle this week, Stratasys, Desktop Metal, 3D Systems and Nano Dimension?
Strangely, Nano Dimension was the only one of the four to rise in value this week, with a jump of near five percent.
The others each dropped in value, ranging from two to six percent.
Would this suggest that the tide of the battle is turning towards Nano Dimension in the minds of investors? I think not. In the past multiple weeks Nano Dimension has been dropping in value, likely due to their repeated unsuccessful takeover proposals to Stratasys. Now it seems that Nano Dimension has bottomed out, and bounced back slightly this week.
As for the others, they have the opposite scenario: they’ve been rising amidst the corporate turmoil, and it’s likely their value rose sufficiently high to cause some shareholders to sell and take some profits.
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.
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.
