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 | Stratasys | 854 | -87 |
| 2 | Xometry | 850 | +35 |
| 3 | Nano Dimension | 706 | +18 |
| 4 | Protolabs | 679 | -10 |
| 5 | 3D Systems | 565 | -91 |
| 6 | Desktop Metal | 414 | -58 |
| 7 | Materialise | 323 | -1 |
| 8 | Velo3D | 313 | +6 |
| 9 | Markforged | 262 | -24 |
| 10 | Steakholder Foods | 45 | 0 |
| 11 | Massivit | 35 | +1 |
| 12 | FATHOM | 31 | -8 |
| 13 | Shapeways | 19 | -2 |
| 14 | Freemelt | 17 | +3 |
| 15 | AML3D | 13 | +1 |
| 16 | Sigma Additive Solutions | 11 | 0 |
| 17 | voxeljet | 10 | -0 |
| 18 | Titomic | 6 | -5 |
| 19 | Sygnis | 5 | +0 |
| 20 | Aurora Labs | 4 | +0 |
| TOTAL | 5,160 | -963 |
This week saw was pretty disastrous for the companies on our leaderboard, with the total dipping a notable 15%. To put that in perspective, if we did this every week, the leaderboard would be worth ZERO by the middle of November.
This dip is quite curious, as the 3D companies tend to exaggerate general market trends, which this week were slightly up or flat. Evidently a number of concerns regarding particular companies drew down the total.
At the top we still have Stratasys, which has been in that position for several weeks as a result of the lengthy takeover saga. At this time the company is considering its options, which may or may not involve 3D Systems or other companies. Their drop of over nine percent this week seems steep, but it was less than half of the leaderboard average.
Rival 3D Systems saw a notable drop of almost 14% in value this week, continuing their downward path that commenced when they began bidding to take over Stratasys. Evidently that move triggered investor attention that may have resulted in this effect.
At the beginning of this year, 3D Systems was 20% larger than Stratasys in value. However, the tables have turned during the past few months, and now we see Stratasys more than 50% larger than 3D Systems. Since a good portion of 3D Systems’ prior bids to takeover Stratasys involved leveraging their share capital, it seems unlikely they could mount an attractive bid at this point. That itself may have caused the drop this week, as investors seem to have soured on 3D Systems.
Another company involved in the takeover saga was Nano Dimension. This week they announced a very interesting AI-based patent that is applicable not only to additive manufacturing, but also other manufacturing technologies. That might have been behind their jump of 2.5% this week.
Desktop Metal, the company that Stratasys intended to merge with, fell twelve percent this week. That’s almost certainly due to the rejection of the merger proposal by Stratasys shareholders.
FATHOM dropped over 21% this week, most likely because of their recent reverse stock split. This was required to keep their place on the stock exchange, but it generally tends to lower valuations.
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.
