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 | 1,573 | -70 |
| 2 | 3D Systems | 1,399 | -74 |
| 3 | Protolabs | 1,340 | +2 |
| 4 | Stratasys | 1,297 | -33 |
| 5 | Materialise | 840 | -69 |
| 6 | Nano Dimension | 785 | +39 |
| 7 | Desktop Metal | 655 | -3 |
| 8 | FATHOM | 579 | -94 |
| 9 | Markforged | 440 | -43 |
| 10 | Velo3D | 412 | -44 |
| 11 | SLM Solutions | 260 | +21 |
| 12 | Shapeways | 78 | -4 |
| 13 | Massivit | 73 | +6 |
| 14 | Meatech 3D | 60 | +9 |
| 15 | Freemelt | 47 | +11 |
| 16 | Fast Radius | 33 | -5 |
| 17 | voxeljet | 28 | -1 |
| 18 | Sigma Labs | 11 | 0 |
| 19 | Sygnis | 11 | -0 |
| 20 | AML3D | 9 | +1 |
| 21 | Aurora Labs | 7 | -1 |
| 22 | Tinkerine | 2 | +0 |
| TOTAL | 9,938 | -353 |
This week saw a slight drop overall, and most companies saw little change in their valuations. That said, the valuations are all down tremendously from months ago, mostly due to general market conditions: if the market is down, that includes 3D print companies. In all the leaderboard total dropped by a bit more than three percent.
The winner of the week was Freemelt, a Swedish manufacturer of a metal 3D printer targeted at research activities. Their stock rose an impressive 29% over the week.
There appears to be several reasons for the sudden jump in Freemelt’s value:
- Their latest financial results show a massive boost in sales over 2021
- One of their board members has increased their stake in the company
- Freemelt is now being covered by Swedish investment bank Redeye
These factors apparently have combined to drive a huge boost to the company’s value.
Another winner of the week was MeaTech 3D, a startup focused on 3D printing cultured meat from bioreactors. Their value rose by almost 19% over the week. The reason for their rise is almost certainly the good financial results released last week, where they indicated a doubling of sales over the prior year, and at the same time reducing expenses. The company recently opened a Belgian outlet for their products, which is evidently driving the revenue increases. While the company is still in its initial stages, these are good signals.
On the flip side, FATHOM Digital Manufacturing slid almost 14% in value, dropping them to eight place on the leaderboard. There doesn’t seem to be a specific reason for this, particularly after their quarterly financials indicated a huge boost in revenue and actual profit — a rarity among most 3D print companies. Instead, the drop is merely a continuation of a trend that’s been happening ever since the company entered the market earlier this year.
In a similar scenario, Velo3D also dropped, as they have been doing for quite a long while, this week to the tune of ten percent. Like FATHOM, Velo3D has incurred a long slide in value in spite of terrific technology and relatively good financials.
There’s a pattern here. Notice also that this week Fast Radius also dropped almost 13% in value. As you can see in their chart, these companies were likely overvalued when they entered the market. As investors learned more about the companies, the stock values eventually converge on a consensus 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.
