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 | 966 | +29 |
| 2 | Xometry | 883 | -5 |
| 3 | Stratasys | 859 | +6 |
| 4 | Nano Dimension | 739 | +18 |
| 5 | 3D Systems | 674 | +121 |
| 6 | Materialise | 317 | -2 |
| 7 | Desktop Metal | 223 | +23 |
| 8 | Markforged | 146 | +13 |
| 9 | Velo3D | 95 | +26 |
| 10 | Massivit | 46 | +6 |
| 11 | FATHOM | 30 | -2 |
| 12 | Titomic | 21 | +1 |
| 13 | Freemelt | 20 | +0 |
| 14 | Steakholder Foods | 16 | -1 |
| 15 | Shapeways | 13 | -0 |
| 16 | AML3D | 11 | -0 |
| 17 | voxeljet | 9 | -1 |
| 18 | Sygnis | 6 | +1 |
| 19 | Aurora Labs | 5 | +0 |
| 20 | Sigma Additive Solutions | 4 | +1 |
| TOTAL | 5,084 | +233 |
This week saw positive moves, which are especially welcome after the disastrous past few weeks. The leaderboard total rose by almost five percent, quite a notable amount. This is quite surprising given that the markets overall fell this week.
It may be that investors saw bargains as the 3D print company stocks had fallen perhaps too far in the past month.
Most companies were flat or up slightly this week, but there were several notable exceptions.
The week’s winner was undoubtedly Velo3D, which saw a massive jump of 38% in value. What caused this huge change in investor sentiment? The only news from the company was the announcement of a machine sale to Bechtel Plant Machinery to help service the US Navy Nuclear Propulsion Program.
Would that be sufficient to drive up the valuation so strongly? I’m not so sure, but it may have been a trigger that attracted investors to the company. Velo3D’s valuation is extraordinarily volatile, and a jump of this magnitude is not without precedent. It could be that some investors now see Velo3D as undervalued, which isn’t surprising given its recent dips.
However, the company is still incredibly below its earlier valuations. In fact, the company was worth over US$1B in mid-2022. The fact that it bumped up US$26M this week isn’t quite as large as it looks when considering the history.
Another winner this week was 3D Systems, but it’s a bit complex as to what transpired. The company’s valuation rose by a very healthy 22% this week after a few weeks of declines. This most likely occurred because of the company’s announcement to repurchase previously issued notes.
Some time ago the company issued notes (basically a loan to investors) to raise US$460M. These remained as debt to the company to pay back at some future date. The deal this week involves buying back that debt from the investors at a surprising discount of 22%. In other words, the company eliminated a big chunk of debt at a discount. That’s good news for investors, very likely triggering the increase in valuation this week.
Desktop Metal rose twelve percent this week, but without any notable news from the company. My suspicion is that the company’s valuation is still slowly recovering from the aborted Stratasys merger some months ago.
Massivit rose 16% this week, most likely because investors discovered that the company recently raised US$5M in new investment. That US$5M is sorta-close to 16% of their previous valuation; a coincidence? I think not.
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.
