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 | 1,926 | -133 |
| 2 | 3D Systems | 1,875 | -366 |
| 3 | Stratasys | 1,440 | -143 |
| 4 | Protolabs | 1,412 | -80 |
| 5 | Velo3D | 1,288 | -187 |
| 6 | Desktop Metal | 1,141 | -65 |
| 7 | FATHOM | 1,140 | -61 |
| 8 | Materialise | 1,021 | -155 |
| 9 | Nano Dimension | 796 | -72 |
| 10 | Markforged | 580 | -139 |
| 11 | SLM Solutions | 325 | -28 |
| 12 | Shapeways | 125 | -43 |
| 13 | Massivit | 91 | -6 |
| 14 | Meatech 3D | 80 | -5 |
| 15 | Freemelt | 41 | 5 |
| 16 | voxeljet | 29 | -1 |
| 17 | Sigma Labs | 21 | -3 |
| 18 | Sygnis | 12 | 0 |
| 19 | Aurora Labs | 10 | 0 |
| 20 | AML3D | 9 | 1 |
| 21 | Tinkerine | 2 | 0 |
| TOTAL | 13,362 | -1,481 |
This week saw a rather precipitous drop in value for most 3D print companies, which is not at all surprising given the events sweeping the world. The leaderboard’s total value dropped by a whopping 10%, as more than a billion was lost.
Aside from a couple of the smaller players on the list, all companies lost notable capitalization. However, some lost more and others lost less.
The best example of that phenomenon was right at the top of the list, where Xometry has dethroned 3D Systems for first place on the list. 3D Systems lost over 16% of their value during the week, while Xometry lost only six and a half percent.
The reason for this divergence is perhaps due to 3D Systems’ financial disclosure this week, where they announced both 2021Q4 and overall 2021 results. While the company increased revenue by 10.5% during 2021, their fourth quarter revenue fell by 12.6%. That shocking figure could have been what set investors to sell, but they may have missed the following statement by 3D Systems:
“A decline of 12.6% compared to Q4 2020 driven solely by divestitures of non-core assets”
This means that they sold off some parts of their business that were not in the long term plans, but the revenue from those companies also left the building, hence the drop in overall revenues. It seems to me this is actually good news for 3D Systems, but evidently the market punished 3D systems regardless. 3D Systems has been doing a very good job managing their business since their CEO took office a couple of years ago. While they still report losses, the gap is closing and I expect they will become profitable in the future.
Meanwhile, Xometry does not plan on releasing their financial results until the 17th, so we’ll see what happens after that.
Among the rest of the leaderboard there were a couple of notable figures.
Shapeways suffered an astonishing 25.65% loss in value over the week. The company did not release their financial results, but plan to do so on March 31st, so we have some time before then. However, it seems that the market has less confidence in the company, resulting in a significant drop. The company at one point was worth more than US$400M, but now is valued at only US$125. Since their launch on the market last fall, it’s basically been a slow downward slide, which is unfortunate for one of the most well-known names in the industry.
Markforged had a notable drop of almost 20% in value over the week. They also have not released their financials, but have set a date of March 15th for the release. Like Shapeways, it appears the market is not favoring Markforged in anticipation of the results.
Stratasys did release their results, and they were actually pretty good. Their revenue for Q4 grew 17.3%, but due to a shrinking margin they posted a somewhat higher loss for the fourth quarter. However, comparing full year 2021 to their 2020 results, their revenue was up by almost 17%, and their margin also increased. Some of this is due to the lousy business environment in 2020, but still, they improved significantly. In spite of this, Stratasys lost nine percent over the week.
Upcoming Changes
We are still awaiting the appearance on the market of one more 3D print company: Fast Radius, a digital manufacturing cloud service that announced their intention to go public.
Another company set to appear in early 2022 is 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, Formlabs and SLM Solutions.
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.
