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 | 1,899 | -6 |
| 2 | 3D Systems | 1,278 | -5 |
| 3 | Stratasys | 955 | +23 |
| 4 | Protolabs | 697 | +53 |
| 5 | Desktop Metal | 648 | -25 |
| 6 | Nano Dimension | 633 | -10 |
| 7 | Materialise | 569 | -13 |
| 8 | SLM Solutions | 505 | -22 |
| 9 | Velo3D | 388 | -60 |
| 10 | FATHOM | 322 | -14 |
| 11 | Markforged | 243 | -27 |
| 12 | Massivit | 50 | -6 |
| 13 | Steakholder Foods | 45 | 0 |
| 14 | Shapeways | 28 | -1 |
| 15 | Titomic | 28 | -0 |
| 16 | voxeljet | 24 | -1 |
| 17 | Freemelt | 24 | -1 |
| 18 | Sygnis | 11 | -0 |
| 19 | Sigma Additive Solutions | 11 | 0 |
| 20 | AML3D | 10 | +1 |
| 21 | Aurora Labs | 4 | -0 |
| 22 | Tinkerine | 1 | +0 |
| TOTAL | 8,372 | -115 |
This week saw a pretty quiet week, which just might happen to have something to do with a holiday weekend in the US. Indeed, Friday’s trading was shortened, and there wasn’t much valuation change among the companies on the leaderboard.
Of course, there were exceptions.
One was Protolabs, which could be considered the winner of the week. Their valuation jumped a healthy eight percent, leapfrogging them into fourth position.
The company’s stock price rose abruptly through the week, beginning on November 21st. That just happened to be the day that Protolabs announced a US$50M extension to their stock buy-back program, which is now to end on Dec 31st. The total amount of the stock buy-back is now US$200M.
Stock buy-backs occur when a company is awash in cash and their stock price is low. By buying their own stock, they effectively take them off the market, making the remaining shares more valuable.
That is precisely what happened here, as the company’s stock value rose. The company’s valuation rose by US$53M. Coincidence? I think that could be the case.
On the other side of the ledger, Velo3D once again appears with a 13% drop in valuation. As usual, this makes zero sense. The company did announce a significant sale of equipment to an existing client, suggesting the client has great confidence in the company’s gear. Why would that cause a 13% drop? I’ve been baffled by the ups and downs of Velo3D for months now, and I’m certain it’s driving their executives batty, too.
Another big drop in value occurred with Markforged, which last week saw a 25% drop due to unfavorable financial results. It looks like this week was a continuation of that effect, with a drop of another ten percent.
Finally, we have Massivit, the Israeli producer of large-format 3D printers and an incredibly innovative new casting hybrid process. The company’s value dropped by ten percent without any announcements or news, either positive or negative. I’m wondering if the drop in value was due to a shareholder deciding to sell a large chunk of their holdings. We’ll see how this fares next week.
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.
