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 quite2 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 | 1,385 | -113 |
| 2 | 3D Systems | 1,356 | +5 |
| 3 | Protolabs | 1,256 | +75 |
| 4 | Stratasys | 1,227 | +55 |
| 5 | Materialise | 907 | -4 |
| 6 | FATHOM | 743 | -112 |
| 7 | Nano Dimension | 726 | +70 |
| 8 | Desktop Metal | 636 | +47 |
| 9 | Markforged | 521 | -26 |
| 10 | Velo3D | 443 | -90 |
| 11 | SLM Solutions | 244 | +4 |
| 12 | Shapeways | 77 | -4 |
| 13 | Massivit | 69 | +1 |
| 14 | Meatech 3D | 44 | -0 |
| 15 | Fast Radius | 36 | NA |
| 16 | Freemelt | 35 | +0 |
| 17 | voxeljet | 28 | -1 |
| 18 | Sygnis | 11 | -1 |
| 19 | Sigma Labs | 11 | +0 |
| 20 | AML3D | 9 | +1 |
| 21 | Aurora Labs | 8 | -1 |
| Tinkerine | 2 | +0 | |
| TOTAL | 9,773 | -57 |
This week was remarkably stable for the participants on the leaderboard, considering the market chaos elsewhere. The leaderboard’s total dropped by less than a percent over last week.
That said, the individual companies fared differently, with the ups mostly balancing out the lows.
Australian metal 3D printer manufacturer AML3D was the week’s winner with a gain of over 14 percent. The reason for the stock price jump is likely related to the company’s announcement of a deal with a “major Australian Energy company” to produce nickel / aluminum / bronze impellers. While they say the deal is for only AU$55K worth of parts, they will also perform a digital inventory for the company to identify further parts that could be 3D printed in the future. Evidently investors see this move as an entry into a potentially very large client and market.
Another winner was Nano Dimension, which saw a market cap rise of over ten percent. This is almost certainly due their announcement of a stock buy-back program of US$100M value. This is an important signal, as it shows the company has confidence in its own progress sufficient to warrant buying more stock, and also puts pressure on others hoping to buy the stock, hence the rise in value.
The week also saw metal 3D printer manufacturer Velo3D drop almost 17%, continuing the extremely puzzling downward trend of that company’s valuation that has been going on for weeks now. As of this weekend Velo3D’s value is US$443M, a far cry from their peak on the leaderboard of US$2,240 last November. This week’s valuation is less than one-fifth of that peak.
The slow drop is baffling, as the company produces unique systems that provide not only high quality results, but also parts that require far less post processing, which could save considerable cash for clients. Their revenue in the past quarter was 10X that of 2021, and they’ve recognized or booked 75% of their revenue for this year already, with a growing backlog of orders due to demand.
One potentially disturbing factor from their most recent financial report might be that their gross margin dropped to zero from a previous 14% in the prior quarter.
Another possible investor concern could be related to rumors that one of Velo3D’s clients has acquired over two dozen systems, which could represent a significant chunk of the company’s sales. This might indicate a risk of too much dependence on a single client for some investors. On the other hand, it could be a sign that the systems work well and should lead to additional sales.
Finally, we’ve added Fast Radius to the leaderboard. The cloud-based manufacturing service previously announced an intention to go public almost a year ago, but after many months of waiting they seem to have slipped onto the exchange a couple of weeks ago under a symbol we had not anticipated. This seems to happen with SPAC entries, as there is a switch of stock symbol during cutover.
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.
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.
