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 | 1,651 | -12 |
| 2 | 3D Systems | 1,313 | +39 |
| 3 | Protolabs | 1,303 | +34 |
| 4 | Stratasys | 1,242 | +63 |
| 5 | Materialise | 831 | +42 |
| 6 | Nano Dimension | 798 | +21 |
| 7 | Desktop Metal | 791 | +83 |
| 8 | FATHOM | 584 | +8 |
| 9 | Markforged | 425 | +11 |
| 10 | Velo3D | 347 | +23 |
| 11 | SLM Solutions | 231 | -4 |
| 12 | Massivit | 63 | -1 |
| 13 | Shapeways | 56 | +4 |
| 14 | Meatech 3D | 46 | +1 |
| 15 | Freemelt | 41 | -0 |
| 16 | Fast Radius | 32 | -0 |
| 17 | voxeljet | 25 | +0 |
| 18 | Sigma Labs | 11 | 0 |
| 19 | Sygnis | 11 | -0 |
| 20 | AML3D | 8 | -0 |
| 21 | Aurora Labs | 6 | +0 |
| 22 | Tinkerine | 2 | +0 |
| TOTAL | 9,816 | +311 |
This week saw perhaps the dullest results received since we initiated this series. The overall leaderboard did rise by some three percent, but almost all companies were basically flat. No company’s ranking changed on the leaderboard this week, a rare occurrence.
The were two exceptions.
One was Desktop Metal, which saw. Rise of almost twelve percent over the week. While the company did announce a new line of foam materials for their ETEC equipment, I suspect the rise is more due to investors finally realizing that Desktop Metal’s acquisitions are bearing fruit, as we detailed this week.
The other exception was Velo3D. The producer of outstanding metal 3D printers has been besieged by investors who have been continually driving down the company’s value for months. Rarely has a week gone by without bad news for Velo3D’s stock price, and most of it seems to me to be unwarranted.
This week, however, we saw a pleasant rise in the company’s value to the tune of seven percent.
What? How could this be? Isn’t Velo3D’s value supposed to keep dropping forever?
No, of course not. They have an excellent business and are making considerable progress. My thinking is that this week’s rise could be due to investors seeing the company unlocking many new potential clients by means of their recently announced Sapphire XC 1MZ device, which has a far larger build volume. That will certainly draw in new customers, hence the rise in company value.
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.
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.
