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 | 3527 | +173 |
| 2 | Xometry | 2250 | -208 |
| 3 | Stratasys | 2065 | +232 |
| 4 | VELO3D | 1885 | +381 |
| 5 | Desktop Metal | 1861 | -81 |
| 6 | Protolabs | 1660 | -323 |
| 7 | Nano Dimension | 1463 | +80 |
| 8 | Materialise | 1404 | +114 |
| 9 | Markforged | 1221 | +22 |
| 10 | ExOne | 515 | +21 |
| 11 | SLM Solutions | 439 | -11 |
| 12 | Shapeways | 433 | -131 |
| TOTAL | 18722 | +268 |
This week saw major shifts in rankings, perhaps the most severe seen since we started tracking 3D print companies earlier this year. Let’s take it from the top.
Leader 3D Systems not only maintained their position at the top of the list, but increased their value by a huge five percent. That may not sound like a big number, but at their size, even a few percentage points adds significant value. The reason for their rise in valuation is likely due to an announcement this week regarding a bioprinting acquisition, which we’ll cover later.
Protolabs plummeted from third to sixth place on the list. The cause of this devaluation is certainly their announcement of missing their expected earnings. Companies announce their plans earlier, and then markets adjust to that expectation. However, if they miss their earnings, then sudden shifts in stock prices occur, and that’s exactly what happened here.
Stratasys leapt all the way up to position three, bringing back memories of the old days when 3D Systems and Stratasys dominated the market. I suspect their near 13% gain is due to investors finally realizing the company has a serious and realistic strategy to gain dominance in the massive AM market of the future.
VELO3D rocketed up to fourth place, from sixth with a 25% gain. This is likely due to a growing awareness of the company’s powerful metal 3D printing capabilities that are in many cases more capable than those of their competitors.
Newcomer Shapeways (are they still a newcomer?) took a huge 23% loss in value. This is very curious, as this week saw their announcement of Otto, a powerful workflow designed to make it easy for industry to make use of their additive network. Shapeways could grow considerably, should this move be successful, and place them near Xometry or Protolabs on our list. Perhaps this makes the company a good buy for future growth.
Materialise also grew nearly nine percent on news they exceeded their expected earnings. However, as massive as the gain was, it didn’t move them up from eighth place.
Other Players
| RANK | COMPANY | CAP | CHG |
| 13 | Massivit | 120 | NA |
| 14 | MeaTech 3D | 82 | -2 |
| 15 | voxeljet | 63 | 0 |
| 16 | Aurora Labs | 13 | -1 |
| 17 | AML3D | 11 | -4 |
| 18 | Tinkerine | 2 | 0 |
| TOTAL | 171 | NA |
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 a modification to our list. We were finally able to find a reliable source for the market capitalization of Massivit, and it turns out they top this list at US$120M. This is quite a value, and likely due to investor interest in the company’s new cast-in-motion technology that should allow them to gain considerable manufacturing interest.
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 now 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.
