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 | 1,785 | -598 |
| 2 | 3D Systems | 1,314 | +268 |
| 3 | Stratasys | 931 | +17 |
| 4 | Nano Dimension | 698 | -13 |
| 5 | Desktop Metal | 686 | -100 |
| 6 | Protolabs | 649 | -28 |
| 7 | Materialise | 606 | +26 |
| 8 | Velo3D | 548 | -160 |
| 9 | SLM Solutions | 530 | +23 |
| 10 | Markforged | 357 | -28 |
| 11 | FATHOM | 351 | +16 |
| 12 | Massivit | 55 | +0 |
| 13 | Steakholder Foods | 45 | 0 |
| 14 | Shapeways | 29 | -1 |
| 15 | Titomic | 29 | +0 |
| 16 | Freemelt | 27 | -0 |
| 17 | voxeljet | 25 | +3 |
| 18 | Fast Radius | 18 | -5 |
| 19 | Sygnis | 12 | +0 |
| 20 | Sigma Additive Solutions | 11 | 0 |
| 21 | AML3D | 9 | -2 |
| 22 | Aurora Labs | 4 | +0 |
| 23 | Tinkerine | 1 | +0 |
| TOTAL | 8,720 | -581 |
This week saw dramatic moves in every direction. While the major market indices were up strongly to the tune of 5-8%, the leaderboard’s total actually dropped significantly in spite of the market positivity.
The reasons for the leaderboard total’s decline was in fact due to certain companies that were punished by the market, bringing down the leaderboard total.
The loser in the past week seems to be leader Xometry, which has soared in value this year and held onto the top spot on our leaderboard for months. At times its value was more than 2X that of the next two companies on the list.
But this week they suffered a staggering 25% loss in value, losing almost US$600M. That decline is about equal to the value of the bottom 13 entries on the leaderboard. When a big company has a large percentage decline, the absolute amount is massive.
Why the decline? The company released its quarterly financials this week, and the following day the stock value cratered. The report indicated a number of very positive results suggesting business was continuing to increase at a rapid rate, but the company still suffered a significant loss of US$15M, which was actually a slight increase. Evidently investors expected the losses to diminish with increasing business volume, but that didn’t seem to happen. It could be that Xometry has extra expenses or too low pricing that might be causing this. Either way, investors didn’t like what they saw.
Velo3D’s value was also down around 22% this week, but at this point I have no idea what’s happening with investor views of this operation. The stock value has jumped up, down, up, down, freely for months. Even this week the stock price started at US$3.87, then dropped to US$2.17 by mid-week, then rose again to US$3.02 by Friday.
Velo3D did announce their quarterly financials, and they were quite good: revenue up 117%, backlog of orders of US$66M, and they’re expecting to perhaps hit US$80M in revenue this year. However, they did post a loss for this quarter, after having posted a significant profit in Q2. That is likely what caused investors to shiver on this company’s stock.
Desktop Metal dropped almost 13% in value, likely because their announced financials were slightly less than anticipated, making investors a bit wary.
On the positive side, however, 3D Systems, in position two on the leaderboard, actually rose almost 26% in value this week. This may at first appear strange because the company actually announced a significant loss for Q3 this week. However, when you look deeper, it turns out the loss in revenue was mainly due to the subtraction of revenues from operations 3D Systems had divested from during the year. Thus it isn’t fair to compare Q3 this year with Q3 last year. The company did say, however, that if you take out those departed businesses, their core activity did rise by 2.7%. This indicates the corporate moves by the company this year seem to be working, and that apparently caught the attention of investors.
Another notable rise this week was voxeljet, which rose almost 13% in value. Unlike the companies above, voxeljet has not yet announced their quarterly financials. However, as a company further down on the leaderboard, it’s likely that investment analysts have only now seen that the company has been busy in October raising money through direct offerings and a sale-leaseback arrangement for one of their facilities. We did see this a few weeks ago, but evidently investors did not.
As for the valuations of the rest of the companies on the leaderboard, most were between -4% and +4%, with some bigger shifts on the small cap companies as is expected.
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.
