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 | 892 | +65 |
| 2 | Xometry | 764 | -44 |
| 3 | Stratasys | 729 | -49 |
| 4 | Nano Dimension | 628 | -23 |
| 5 | 3D Systems | 560 | -25 |
| 6 | Materialise | 330 | -6 |
| 7 | Velo3D | 272 | +7 |
| 8 | Desktop Metal | 252 | -63 |
| 9 | Markforged | 157 | +7 |
| 10 | FATHOM | 32 | +3 |
| 11 | Massivit | 26 | 0 |
| 12 | Freemelt | 19 | +0 |
| 13 | Steakholder Foods | 14 | -1 |
| 14 | Shapeways | 13 | -2 |
| 15 | AML3D | 13 | +2 |
| 16 | voxeljet | 11 | -0 |
| 17 | Titomic | 7 | +0 |
| 18 | Sygnis | 6 | +0 |
| 19 | Aurora Labs | 4 | -0 |
| 20 | Sigma Additive Solutions | 3 | +0 |
| TOTAL | 4,730 | -129 |
This week saw a return to “normal” after last week’s blockbuster rise in valuations. Instead of double-digit percentage rises, we saw a dip of a couple of percent on the leaderboard overall. That’s contrary to the market this week, which was generally up a percent or so. It may be that last week’s rise was “too much”, and this week we’ve seen a correction.
One of the biggest gainers of the week was FATHOM, which rose a startling ten percent on the week. This follows a switch in leadership at the company, which evidently has boosted investor confidence.
On the other side we have a couple of companies that suffered notable devaluations this week. One was Desktop Metal, which was voted out of their proposed merger with Stratasys some weeks ago. It seems that investors may be continuing to react negatively to that news, particularly since the company still hasn’t announced a dramatic new strategy to replace the merger approach.
The company did announce financial results on Friday, which were semi-positive. Revenue dropped in third quarter, year-over-year, but Desktop Metal attributed that to overall market conditions. However, they did announce completion of a huge US$100M expense savings project, which is ahead of planned dates. Nevertheless, investors handed the company a 20% dip in valuation this week.
Shapeways dipped 14% in advance of their financial release next week. It seems that investors are not looking positively towards that release. However, we could be surprised and we’ll have to watch this carefully next week.
Protolabs remains at the top of the leaderboard, where they landed last week after notably positive financial results. That was the first time the company has topped the board, and they could be there for a while given the performance of other 3D companies. This week they stretched their lead with a jump of almost eight percent.
What of the three consolidation contenders that recently battled for Stratasys?
All three, Stratasys, 3D Systems and Nano Dimension all plunged between 3-6 percent this week, abiding by the overall leaderboard trend. Stratasys remains 30% larger than 3D Systems.
Finally, one of the companies we’ve been watching to enter the market is now “off the market”. Essentium announced plans to be acquired by Nexa3D, a privately held company that won’t appear on the leaderboard. Perhaps in the future Nexa3D may do an IPO, but no plans have been announced to do so.
Upcoming Changes
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.
