Who’s The Biggest In 3D Printing, November 7, 2021

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	4050	+523
2	Desktop Metal	2312	+451
3	Stratasys	2270	+205
4	VELO3D	2240	+355
5	Xometry	1987	-263
6	Protolabs	1711	+51
7	Materialise	1514	+111
8	Nano Dimension	1443	-20
9	Markforged	1336	+115
10	ExOne	598	+83
11	SLM Solutions	434	-5
12	Shapeways	426	-7
	TOTAL	20322	+1599

This week saw major moves in the market, with positive moves by most of the players. Let’s take this apart one company at a time.

3D Systems, still atop the leaderboard, once again passed the US$4B valuation mark. They’ve done this twice before in our tracking, in July of this year, and most recently last September. They have not yet announced their quarterly earnings, but the market seems to be expecting good things. The company’s valuation could change dramatically if results are different from expectations.

Xometry, in second place last week, now falls to fifth place with a near twelve percent drop in valuation. They also have not announced their quarterly earnings yet (expected next week), so it may be that investors have low expectations.

The drop by Xometry made room for several others to leap up the list, with Stratasys holding onto position three.

Desktop Metal rose to second place, all the way from last week’s fifth place. This could be due to a series of announcements from the company regarding their metal production equipment. This includes several new materials that could broaden their market, as well as a tripling of manufacturing capacity for their P-50 system. Evidently that combination of news was worthy of a more than 24% rise in value.

Materialise leapt over Nano Dimension to take seventh place, in spite of the latter company’s incredible news regarding the acquisition of a PCB manufacturer that could propel their product forward in dramatic fashion.

ExOne saw a rise of over 16%, which I find strange as they’ve agreed to an acquisition by Desktop Metal that hasn’t yet closed. Who is buying and selling that stock?

Other Players

RANK	COMPANY	CAP	CHG
13	Massivit	121	0
14	MeaTech 3D	86	+4
15	voxeljet	67	+4
16	Aurora Labs	16	+3
17	AML3D	13	+1
18	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 positive or neutral changes to positions on our smaller players leaderboard. Nobody lost value, which is always a good thing.

Massivit is still the leader in this category, with a US$121M valuation. Other players saw modest gains, with Aurora Labs seeing the biggest change with a 19% gain.

The gain by Aurora Labs is due to their completion of certain milestones on their path to producing a metal 3D printer capable of printing one tonne per day. So far the company has regular met these milestones, and work continues. If they succeed, they will unlock tremendous value for industrial metal 3D printing.

A bit more news from Aurora Labs had them request the Australian stock exchange halt trading of their shares, while the company prepares details of an upcoming major capital raise. Apparently they will have trading stopped until November 8, or earlier if they can produce these details. These news items are the likely cause of their stock’s rise.

AML3D rose ten percent on news they will “supply a specialised 3D printed alloy to a leading North American aerospace manufacturing company.” While the secretive deal cannot be disclosed due to confidentiality reasons, the fact that they’ve struck such a deal suggests they might be able to do additional similar deals. That sounds like news worth ten percent.

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.