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 | 1,190 | -4 |
| 2 | Stratasys | 966 | -7 |
| 3 | Protolabs | 824 | +70 |
| 4 | SLM Solutions | 655 | -3 |
| 5 | Nano Dimension | 633 | +8 |
| 6 | Xometry | 621 | -42 |
| 7 | Desktop Metal | 561 | -140 |
| 8 | Materialise | 535 | +4 |
| 9 | Velo3D | 397 | -54 |
| 10 | Markforged | 159 | -32 |
| 11 | FATHOM | 59 | -6 |
| 12 | Massivit | 48 | +2 |
| 13 | Steakholder Foods | 45 | 0 |
| 14 | Freemelt | 29 | -2 |
| 15 | Shapeways | 19 | +4 |
| 16 | voxeljet | 18 | -0 |
| 17 | Titomic | 15 | -2 |
| 18 | AML3D | 12 | -0 |
| 19 | Sigma Additive Solutions | 11 | 0 |
| 20 | Sygnis | 10 | +0 |
| 21 | Aurora Labs | 3 | +0 |
| TOTAL | 6,810 | -203 |
This week saw a return to the normal pattern, where 3D print company valuations spray wildly above and below the leaderboard and market averages. The past few weeks have been relatively quiet, but evidently that’s changed this week, likely triggered by a number of annual financial releases.
The week’s winner was no doubt Shapeways. The well-known print service has struggled mightily since they went public in 2021. Their valuation absolutely plummeted from a high in the US$400M range to mid-teens in recent weeks. However, this week their valuation skyrocketed by a massive 28%.
What caused the bump? While the company has yet to announce their 2022 financials (coming next week), the did announce new functionality in their MFG.com platform, which they acquired some time ago. New is the ability to both issue and pay invoices on the platform, vastly streamlining the path to using MFG.com. The new software integrates directly with participants ERP software, making it all quite automatic. This could indeed attract and retain many more participants and customers.
This announcement was issued on May 3rd, and the valuation rise began on May 5th. Coincidence? Possibly.
It is also possible that investors have a belief that there could be some good news coming for the company in their financial release due on the 15th. However, Shapeways still has an enormous amount of ground to make up to recover to their high valuation of years past.
Protolabs also leapt upwards over nine percent this week, with a huge jump on May 5th, the same day the company released their first quarter results. In their statement, the quarterly revenue was barely larger than the prior year’s. However, they saw 67% growth in their Hubs platform (formerly 3D Hubs), which could be a very good sign. In addition, they apparently bought back US$21.1M in stock, which could also account for a valuation jump.
On the other side of the ledger, we had several companies suffer notable valuation decreases.
The biggest drop was from Desktop Metal, which saw a valuation change of negative twenty percent this week. While they haven’t issued their 2022 financials yet (coming next week), the drop is not as significant as it may initially appear. The company’s valuation was low in January, but has been bouncing up and down since then. My suspicion is that this week’s movement is simply investors trying to guess the financials before they are issued. With this shift, Desktop Metal slides to event position on the leaderboard.
A similar patterns was seen with Markforged, which fell in value 17% this week, about a week before it issues their financials.
Velo3D did issue their financials, and the result was a drop in valuation of about twelve percent. What was in the financials that struck investors? It seems that Velo3D’s revenues were slightly down over 22Q4, which isn’t a great signal. However, the company did manage to double their margin to ten percent, as a result of an internal expense management program.
Nevertheless, Velo3D did post a significant loss (US$36M) for the quarter. To put that in perspective, the company’s cash and investments are now at only US$64M, suggesting there could be cash concerns in coming quarters. At the beginning of 2022, the company had US$186M in reserves.
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.
