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 | 804 | +9 |
| 2 | Xometry | 795 | -96 |
| 3 | Stratasys | 661 | -17 |
| 4 | Nano Dimension | 520 | -37 |
| 5 | 3D Systems | 494 | +11 |
| 6 | Materialise | 303 | -15 |
| 7 | Desktop Metal | 212 | -69 |
| 8 | Markforged | 111 | -15 |
| 9 | Velo3D | 65 | -3 |
| 10 | Titomic | 57 | +21 |
| 11 | FATHOM | 36 | +0 |
| 12 | Massivit | 33 | 0 |
| 13 | AML3D | 14 | -1 |
| 14 | Steakholder Foods | 10 | -2 |
| 15 | Aurora Labs | 9 | +0 |
| 16 | Shapeways | 8 | -3 |
| 17 | Freemelt | 7 | -2 |
| 18 | Sygnis | 4 | +0 |
| TOTAL | 4,141 | -217 |
This week saw pretty disastrous results for many companies, with the leaderboard total dropping a huge five percent – that’s one percent per day!
This is quite surprising, as the markets trended up this week, with the DJI up nearly two percent. Even the NASDAQ was up half a percent. Typically the 3D print companies will exaggerate general trends, but that was not the case at all this week.
(Formerly) in position one, Xometry, dropped a spot with a nearly eleven percent drop in valuation this week, placing rival Protolabs in the lead. However, there’s more to the story.
It seems that in the lead up to Xometry’s release of quarterly financials on Friday the stock price dipped. Presumably that was due to skittish investors expecting something bad. However, that wasn’t the case: Xometry’s revenue was up 16%, and profit increased 22%, with their loss contracting by 37%. All good news. As a result, the after-hours trading on Friday pumped up the valuation quite a bit, which we will undoubtedly see next week.
Desktop Metal dropped a massive 25% this week. This was, as you might expect, a result of their financials presented on Thursday. They reported revenue down “less than 2%”, which is not particularly good in a market where growth is expected. They did manage to improve their margins to 5.4%, which is still pretty low. The company has been reducing expenses for ninth months in a row, but in spite of that still posted a loss of US$52.1M for the quarter. That’s a big number, on pace for over US$200M annually. It’s not a surprise then, to see investors drop the valuation of Desktop Metal.
Shapeways presented perhaps the most interesting corporate news of the week. Their valuation dropped by a huge 26% this week, continuing the long term downward trajectory. The company at one point was valued as high as US$564M on our weekly check in, but now is worth only US$8M. That’s a decline in value of 98.6%, almost zeroing out the company.
Shapeways had previously announced they were investigating alternatives, and it seems they’ve come up with one: Shapeways announced they are selling their software assets to OTTO dms, Inc.
Keep in mind that Shapeways is essentially a software business, so this is selling the core of the company.
What is OTTO dms? It’s a separate company that just happens to be controlled by Shapeways CEO, Greg Kress, and their software unit chief, Greg Rothman. It looks therefore like the staff are taking over the company. Hopefully they will be able to turn it around. If they do, then they could enable very substantial gains. Also note that when this sale goes through, it’s likely we will drop Shapeways from the leaderboard, while OTTO dms is private and won’t appear on the leaderboard.
Markforged was on the negative side of the ledger this week, with a twelve percent drop in valuation. This is also due to their financial results, which showed a 20% drop in revenue. That’s never good in a growth industry. However, they did improve their margins and reduced their operating expenses. Nevertheless, their quarterly loss increased to US$35.9M, and investors reacted accordingly.
Were all the companies negative this week? Actually no, a few managed to go up a point, but the most notable was Titomic, which rose an unbelievable 59% in value. On Tuesday their stock price rose significantly, and it seems to be holding. The only news from the company was an announcement of the sale of a US$800K system to an American company. That’s good news, but hardly enough to push the company’s valuation up by US$21M in a single week.
Titomic’s valuation has been extraordinarily volatile, with multiple instances over the past year of incredibly huge jumps upward — and downward. The moves have been so dramatic that the Australian Stock Exchange formally asked them for explanations. In each case Titomic denied any knowledge of what was going on. However, it’s pretty clear there has been some aggressive speculation taking place on this company.
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.
