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.
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 first take a look at the major 3D printing companies on this week’s list. I consider these companies “major” because their market valuations are significantly larger than others in the space.
Major Players
| RANK | COMPANY | CAP | CHG |
| 1 | 3D Systems | 3104 | -172 |
| 2 | Xometry | 2415 | +153 |
| 3 | VELO3D | 2218 | +62 |
| 4 | Desktop Metal | 2149 | -95 |
| 5 | Stratasys | 1944 | -232 |
| 6 | Protolabs | 1459 | -175 |
| 7 | Materialise | 1416 | -59 |
| 8 | Markforged | 1347 | -9 |
| 9 | Nano Dimension | 1207 | -202 |
| 10 | SLM Solutions | 432 | -13 |
| 11 | Shapeways | 266 | -114 |
| TOTAL | 17958 | -1452 |
This week saw downward movement among almost all players in the market. While the NASDAQ and S&P500 rose somewhat, the Dow dropped around two percent this week. However, the 3D print players in all dropped an aggregate of 7.5% this week. This is typical, as this highly technical area tends to take hints from the larger market much more dramatically.
You may notice something missing from the chart: ExOne. The company had accepted a purchase offer from Desktop Metal and the deal finally closed this week. Because of this, their listing has been taken off the market, as their value is now incorporated into Desktop Metal’s valuation. However, Desktop Metal’s valuation has not risen this week, and in fact actually dropped some four percent. This may indicate that investors had already priced in the ExOne value into the company’s valuation prior to closing.
Leader 3D Systems dropped over five percent, and this may have something to do with their huge raise of US$460M convertible notes. Basically, the investors gain the right to cash repayments and/or company shares at some future point if the company meets certain milestones. Basically, it’s a fancy way to get a big loan, and one wonders what, exactly, 3D Systems intends to do with half a billion dollars. Their press release states a number of general purposes for the cash, but it would seem likely some type of acquisition is in the works, as that would be one of the few things that amount of cash could serve well. More to come on this, I suspect.
VELO3D rose to third spot based on a three percent rise against mostly other players losing out. Xometry held onto second place due to a healthy seven percent gain.
Stratasys lost over ten percent of their value over the week, causing them to drop a spot to fifth place.
The most notable change this past week was Shapeways, which lost an astonishing 30% of their value. From a stock price high of almost US$11 on October 20th, their stock price has now plummeted to US$5.50, half of their recent peak. That is quite concerning, and it seems the drop may be related to their recent release of financials, where they disturbingly report a fiver percent drop in Q3 revenue from Q3 2020. For businesses with a transactional business model like Shapeways, that’s not good news, and evidently investors felt the same.
Other Players
| RANK | COMPANY | CAP | CHG |
| 12 | Massivit | 124 | -1 |
| 13 | MeaTech 3D | 84 | +2 |
| 14 | voxeljet | 56 | -6 |
| 15 | Aurora Labs | 14 | +2 |
| 16 | AML3D | 11 | 0 |
| 17 | Tinkerine | 2 | 0 |
| TOTAL |
The lesser valued companies tend to have much smaller shifts in their market capitalization because there is far less trading occurring on their stocks. The big money tends to hover around the larger players.
This week saw voxeljet suffer a near-ten percent loss in value, in spite of a reasonable financial report stating their revenue was slightly up for the quarter, year-over-year, as well as increased gross profit margin and increased service revenues.
The big winner was Aurora Labs, which saw a massive 20.6% gain. This is almost certainly due to the announcement they’ve contracted with consultants to begin developing product commercialization strategies. For the company, this is a major step that suggests their high-speed metal 3D printing technology could be ready to make some money. Up to now, the company has basically been doing research and development of their advanced system, and has successfully met a series of milestones.
AML3D announced a number of purchase orders for metal 3D printing equipment, yet their value increased only by two percent. The unnamed new clients are in the oil & gas and defense markets, which could suggest more are on the way if these engagements are successful. Perhaps this will be noticed by investors in coming days.
Upcoming Changes
We are still awaiting the appearance on the market of two other 3D print companies. One is FATHOM, a digital manufacturer, which has been developing a SPAC (Special Purpose Acquisition Company) maneuver to complete later this year. The other is Fast Radius, a digital manufacturing cloud service.
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, Formlabs and SLM Solutions.
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.
