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 | 1,498 | -134 |
| 2 | 3D Systems | 1,350 | -86 |
| 3 | Protolabs | 1,181 | -81 |
| 4 | Stratasys | 1,173 | -114 |
| 5 | Materialise | 910 | -12 |
| 6 | FATHOM | 855 | +51 |
| 7 | Nano Dimension | 656 | -64 |
| 8 | Desktop Metal | 589 | -661 |
| 9 | Markforged | 546 | -56 |
| 10 | Velo3D | 533 | -73 |
| 11 | SLM Solutions | 240 | -15 |
| 12 | Shapeways | 81 | -8 |
| 13 | Massivit | 68 | -3 |
| 14 | Meatech 3D | 44 | -9 |
| 15 | Freemelt | 35 | +1 |
| 16 | voxeljet | 29 | -2 |
| 17 | Sygnis | 12 | 0 |
| 18 | Sigma Labs | 11 | -2 |
| 19 | Aurora Labs | 8 | +1 |
| 20 | AML3D | 8 | +1 |
| 21 | Tinkerine | 2 | -0 |
| TOTAL | 9,830 | -1267 |
This week saw pretty horrible results all around. While the general market conditions were definitely not good, with markets falling and crypto imploding, the 3D print companies seemed to suffer considerably. The leaderboard’s total fell by over eleven percent, a loss of well over US$1B.
Virtually all companies on the leaderboard suffered significant valuation drops over the week, with the exception of a couple of small cap companies where dramatic ups and downs are normal. This, combined with quarterly financial results released by several major companies, made for an interesting week to be sure.
By far the largest drop this week was Desktop Metal. That company’s valuation dropped an astonishing 53% since last week, by far the largest change we’ve seen since the leaderboard was initiated, and was literally half of the week’s total loss for the leaderboard.
Why such an enormous drop? It’s all about cash. While the company did report near quadrupling their revenues over 1Q21, they still suffered a significant quarterly loss of US$70M, which is more than double the loss from 1Q21. Even worse, their operating expenses more than doubled.
The problem seems to be that investors have observed the burn rate of Desktop Metal is approaching their cash levels. In other words, without turning a profit, they are slowly (well, rapidly) eating into their savings. At the rate they’re burning cash, they could run out in a year or so unless things change.
Finally, the company then issued a sales of US$150 in convertible notes to raise cash, which obviously would help the financial position, but clearly scared investors, resulting in the big valuation drop.
The company is now in eighth spot on the leaderboard, with a valuation of only US$589. This is a far cry from a year ago, when we reported their valuation at that time of US$3732, more than six times larger.
Desktop Metal has spent a year acquiring a number of different companies and now has to put things together to form a far more efficient company that is able to reliably turn a profit.
As for the rest, there’s not much to say, as most suffered valuation losses between 5-10%. The exceptions being MeaTech 3D, which dropped 17%, and Velo3D, which dropped another 12%. Both companies have been trending downward for weeks, so the lousy general market conditions simply made their losses even larger.
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 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.
