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 | 1,171 | -67 |
| 2 | Stratasys | 1,106 | -72 |
| 3 | Xometry | 994 | -90 |
| 4 | Protolabs | 873 | -35 |
| 5 | SLM Solutions | 639 | -8 |
| 6 | Desktop Metal | 617 | -48 |
| 7 | Nano Dimension | 560 | -76 |
| 8 | Materialise | 496 | +43 |
| 9 | Velo3D | 402 | +33 |
| 10 | Markforged | 224 | +8 |
| 11 | FATHOM | 46 | -4 |
| 12 | Steakholder Foods | 45 | 0 |
| 13 | Massivit | 36 | -1 |
| 14 | Shapeways | 20 | -2 |
| 15 | Freemelt | 20 | -2 |
| 16 | voxeljet | 17 | -1 |
| 17 | Sigma Additive Solutions | 11 | 0 |
| 18 | Titomic | 9 | +1 |
| 19 | AML3D | 8 | -1 |
| 20 | Sygnis | 8 | -0 |
| 21 | Aurora Labs | 3 | -0 |
| TOTAL | 7,306 | -321 |
This week saw a dip in the overall markets to the tune of about two percent. Accordingly, the 3D print leaderboard’s total dropped by four percent, as it typically exaggerates larger market patterns. This is expected because AM many investors consider the technology to be strange and advanced where there must be some extra risk involved — even if that isn’t actually true.
Materialise’s valuation bumped upwards almost ten percent this week, but that seems to be simply a recovery from a previous dip — and it hasn’t recovered all the way yet.
Velo3D also did quite well, gaining almost nine percent in valuation this week. Again, there were no specific financial announcements from the company, but they did issue news about an Italian company purchasing a couple of units from Velo3D. Remember that these are rather large sales; Velo3D is not on the “low price sell many” plan, but quite the opposite. The sale evidently caused investors to have some confidence and the valuation jumped.
On the other side, we have Nano Dimension, which lost a whopping twelve percent in value this week. The Israeli company has been involved in significant intrigue with their repeated attempts to take over Stratasys, but have thus far been unsuccessful. The window for them to complete this purchase is closing rapidly, as Stratasys proposed a merger with Desktop Metal that would make the resulting company likely too big for Nano Dimension’s affordability.
This week they announced “record results”, but somehow that wasn’t sufficient for shareholders to increase or even maintain the company’s valuation. It may be that investors are beginning to realize that Nano Dimension’s dream of absorbing Stratasys is coming to an end.
One company I was initially surprised to see highlighted in our database was Shapeways, which has struggled to maintain their valuation in recent months. Somehow, our report showed a 640% increase this week, which looked rather suspicious. After some investigation, it seems that the company executed an 8-1 reverse stock split, which caused the reporting error.
Why are they reverse splitting? I suspect it’s because their stock price has dipped so low it’s in danger of being delisted. This is a dilemma that faces several other 3D print companies that have had declines in valuation. Even after the reverse split, it seems that Shapeways valuation dipped by over eight percent this week, suggesting that investors didn’t like the forced reverse split.
Finally, I was expecting to see a bump in Steakholder Foods, the company that is able to 3D print truly edible steaks. This week there was an announcement allowing the use of cultured chicken meat in the US, which I would have thought would cause Steakholder Foods to jump up. If cultured food is slowly being accepted, then it should be good for them? I was wrong, they were flat this week. Perhaps investors will notice this next week.
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.
