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 | 3D Systems | 1,048 | -46 |
| 2 | Stratasys | 954 | -88 |
| 3 | Xometry | 896 | +82 |
| 4 | Protolabs | 831 | -17 |
| 5 | SLM Solutions | 634 | -7 |
| 6 | Nano Dimension | 603 | -18 |
| 7 | Materialise | 576 | +50 |
| 8 | Desktop Metal | 563 | +13 |
| 9 | Velo3D | 323 | -8 |
| 10 | Markforged | 175 | -10 |
| 11 | FATHOM | 67 | -4 |
| 12 | Steakholder Foods | 45 | 0 |
| 13 | Massivit | 36 | -4 |
| 14 | Shapeways | 26 | +6 |
| 15 | Freemelt | 25 | -1 |
| 16 | voxeljet | 17 | +0 |
| 17 | Sigma Additive Solutions | 11 | 0 |
| 18 | AML3D | 10 | -0 |
| 19 | Titomic | 9 | -4 |
| 20 | Sygnis | 8 | +0 |
| 21 | Aurora Labs | 3 | -0 |
| TOTAL | 6,860 | -55 |
This week saw a dip in the overall market, which usually means the companies on the leaderboard suffer, and indeed they did, with some exceptions.
On the positive side, we have Shapeways jumping up an amazing 28% this week. This follows several other increases over the past few weeks, as investors are warming to the company. Shapeways is perhaps the company that lost the most value in the past two years, but even these recent increases don’t make up the gap.
Xometry leapt upwards ten percent, recovering some of the ground they lost in the past couple of months. For many months they sat atop the leaderboard, but they jumped up one spot this week to position three.
Materialise also had a good week, gaining eight percent in value. This is certainly due to their recent positive financials, as well as a software announcement that enables more functionality for customers.
Now we come to the most interesting three companies of the week: Stratasys, Desktop Metal and Nano Dimension. Nano Dimension has been knocking on Stratasys’ door for months with a variety of takeover offers, all of which were summarily rejected by Stratasys.
Meanwhile, behind the scenes Stratasys had been having secret talks with Desktop Metal, which resulted in a dramatic merger announcement. Bizarrely, Nano Dimension still presented yet another takeover offer in the midst of the merger announcement. It’s expected that Stratasys will reject that offer this week.
Amidst all this corporate turmoil, how did the valuation of these companies settle out?
Stratasys went down slightly, while Desktop Metal went up slightly. The sum of their valuations dropped very slightly, week over week, possibly suggesting investors are wary of the merger.
Meanwhile, Nano Dimension dropped about three percent, as it is highly unlikely they can engage with the soon-to-be-much-larger Stratasys. Perhaps they’ll attempt to acquire other, smaller 3D print companies.
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.
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.
