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 | Bright Laser | $3,065 | -316 |
| 2 | Farsoon | $2,573 | -520 |
| 3 | Xometry | $1,229 | +9 |
| 4 | Proto Labs | $896 | -35 |
| 5 | Stratasys | $704 | +3 |
| 6 | Nano Dimension | $476 | -11 |
| 7 | 3D Systems | $353 | -46 |
| 8 | Materialise | $309 | +13 |
| 9 | Titomic | $201 | +9 |
| 10 | Desktop Metal | $83 | +15 |
| 11 | Markforged | $46 | -7 |
| 12 | AML3D | $44 | +2 |
| 13 | BigRep | $31 | -7 |
| 14 | Aurora Labs | $15 | -0 |
| 15 | Massivit | $8 | -0 |
| 16 | Freemelt | $4 | -3 |
| 17 | Steakholder Foods | $3 | +0 |
| 18 | Sygnis | $3 | +0 |
| TOTAL | $10,043 | -895 |
This week saw all major indices down, confirming major gloom among investors. The slightly brighter item was that towards the end of the week things started to curve upwards. Not enough to produce a positive result for the week, however.
The leaderboard fell a whopping eight percent this week, as it now appears tariffs and other unexpected economic friction takes hold.
At the top of the leaderboard we were still mystified by the unexpected jump in value experienced by BLT last week. As much as I searched, I could not find any reason for this major upward shift.
This week, however, it seems that the company has issued a statement to the Shanghai Stock Exchange attempting to explain things. Evidently there is a rule on that exchange whereby companies must officially report if a change of more than 20% is observed.
In the PDF announcement (Chinese), the company does not know the cause of the “abnormal fluctuation in its stock price”. They performed a thorough investigation, and found that the price increase of 30% through March 5-7 was not triggered by any company announcements (which we noted last week), nor were there any major undisclosed events. They did not detect any insider trading, and company operations were normal.
This is all very strange because the company issued a warning about recent declines in profit, yet investors still seem to be buying the stock and pushing up the value.
Nevertheless, this week BLT’s value dropped, down nine percent.
Second place Farsoon also experienced a rapid jump in value last week, but there were no explanations last week, nor this week. This week the company fell 17%, perhaps sliding back to a natural level.
There’s something mysterious going on at the Chinese stock exchanges.
3D Systems fell almost 12% this week, but there is somewhat brighter news. The stock price declined day after day, but then towards the end of the week popped upwards a bit. This may signal the bottoming out of the price in anticipation of the company’s upcoming financial statements.
Desktop Metal unexpectedly rose 22% in value this week. No official announcements were observed from the company, but it seems investors are keen on the company. It could be that some believe the merger with Nano Dimension may proceed after all, in spite of the regime change at Nano Dimension. The upward movement would push the company’s value closer to the amount agreed upon as the acquisition price. However, it’s still quite far below that value.
Meanwhile, the other company intended for acquisition by Nano Dimension that’s also patiently waiting is Markforged. That company’s value fell almost 14% this week. Again, there were no official announcements from the company, so this is entirely on investor sentiment. Could it be that investors somehow believe that Nano Dimension would proceed with the Desktop Metal acquisition but not the Markforged acquisition?
BigRep fell 18% this week, which might seem like a lot. However, the company’s valuation has been extraordinarily volatile since it went on the market some months ago. We’ve seen many dramatic ups and downs, and this week it was a down.
Nevertheless, the company’s valuation smooths out into a predictable curve if you look at it in the long term as above.
Upcoming Changes
We’ve heard very little about companies intending to become publicly traded recently. This is due to the ongoing lack of investor interest in the technology. The technology’s reputation has suffered immensely in the investment community because of multiple large-scale investment failures in the past few years.
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.
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