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 | 1,342 | -150 |
| 2 | Stratasys | 1,030 | +78 |
| 3 | Protolabs | 873 | -51 |
| 4 | Xometry | 791 | -32 |
| 5 | Nano Dimension | 713 | -85 |
| 6 | Desktop Metal | 663 | -51 |
| 7 | SLM Solutions | 534 | -3 |
| 8 | Materialise | 480 | -41 |
| 9 | Velo3D | 445 | -156 |
| 10 | Markforged | 210 | -87 |
| 11 | FATHOM | 106 | -55 |
| 12 | Steakholder Foods | 45 | 0 |
| 13 | Massivit | 40 | +1 |
| 14 | Freemelt | 31 | +4 |
| 15 | Shapeways | 21 | -3 |
| 16 | Titomic | 20 | -4 |
| 17 | voxeljet | 18 | -2 |
| 18 | Sygnis | 12 | +0 |
| 19 | Sigma Additive Solutions | 11 | 0 |
| 20 | AML3D | 10 | -1 |
| 21 | Aurora Labs | 4 | -1 |
| 22 | Tinkerine | 1 | -0 |
| TOTAL | 7,401 | -640 |
This week saw mostly negative results, and not without considerable controversy.
At the top of the leaderboard remains 3D Systems, which took over top spot after long-time leader Xometry dropped notably after posting their 2022 financial results. Those results were not exactly what was expected by investors, and they acted accordingly. This week Xometry remains in fourth place on the leaderboard, just behind Protolabs — a company with a similar business model.
Overall the leaderboard total dropped by almost eight percent, which is definitely a significant amount. However, that shift is in line with the NASDAQ index, which dropped over five percent this week. As usual, the 3D print companies exaggerated the trend.
Velo3D dropped an amazing 26% in value this week. The valuation slide seems to have been triggered by their 2022 financial results, which showed that although they hugely increased revenue, their margin dropped from 18.1% to only 3.6%. They actually posted a US$10M GAAP profit for 2022, as opposed to the US$107M GAAP loss in 2021. It may be that investors see the company’s slowly dwindling cash reserves (now US$80M from US$223M in 2021) and have concerns. However, this particular company has been by far the most volatile of any of we track, so their investors are no doubt used to this scenario.
FATHOM, a manufacturing service provider, suddenly dropped a whopping 34% in value on Friday. As far as I can tell, they have not yet issued their 2022 financials, but evidently somebody has suspicions about those results. Their most recent filing was on February 24th, and described an internal reorganization to deal with “legacy management” from their 13 different corporate acquisitions since 2019. That’s good news for the company, but there are notable expenses required to write off equipment, handle relocation costs and termination expenses.
Markforged’s valuation also dropped to the tune of 29%. This likely was due to their 2022 financials, which were released this past week. In the results, Markforged reported modest increases in revenue, and a net loss driven by declining margins. That’s not exactly what investors want to see, hence the drop in value.
The big controversy this week, however, was the surprise announcement of a takeover bid for Stratasys by none other than Nano Dimension. Both companies are somewhat similarly valued on the leaderboard, although Stratasys has been the higher of the two most weeks.
The controversy results from the shareholders of Nano Dimension wanting the company to return over US$1B in a cash hoard controlled by the company. Nano Dimension’s board, however, wants to use that money on a questionable acquisition: Stratasys. I was quite curious to see how this would affect the valuations of each company, and now we know.
Stratasys jumped up 14% in value the day after the surprise announcement. Correspondingly, Nano Dimension dropped around 13% in value. That’s because a big part of that company’s valuation is in fact that fat, sweet, cash reserve. However, some Nano Dimension shareholders believe the company should be valued even higher but is being held back by poor management performance — and the surprise Stratasys bid is likely not going to rectify that impression on investors.
The takeover bid is unlikely to proceed for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that it is almost certainly way too low. Nano Dimension doesn’t have additional cash to raise their bid, so, there we are. The coming weeks are sure to be very interesting.
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.
