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 | 2,602 | +266 |
| 2 | 3D Systems | 1,317 | +60 |
| 3 | Stratasys | 1,142 | +20 |
| 4 | Desktop Metal | 1,104 | +145 |
| 5 | Protolabs | 1,102 | +51 |
| 6 | Velo3D | 797 | +67 |
| 7 | Materialise | 748 | +75 |
| 8 | Nano Dimension | 710 | +36 |
| 9 | Markforged | 493 | +58 |
| 10 | SLM Solutions | 453 | -1 |
| 11 | FATHOM | 427 | -24 |
| 12 | Massivit | 131 | -4 |
| 13 | Fast Radius | 48 | -3 |
| 14 | Steakholder Foods | 45 | 0 |
| 15 | Shapeways | 41 | -1 |
| 16 | Titomic | 37 | -2 |
| 17 | voxeljet | 35 | +0 |
| 18 | Freemelt | 32 | -0 |
| 19 | Sigma Additive Solutions | 11 | 0 |
| 20 | AML3D | 11 | -2 |
| 21 | Sygnis | 10 | -0 |
| 22 | Aurora Labs | 5 | +0 |
| 23 | Tinkerine | 2 | +0 |
| TOTAL | 11,303 | +740 |
This week saw a rather large rise in total valuation for the leaderboard, but as usual this seven percent jump was composed of (mostly) rises and some dips.
Desktop Metal led the gainers this week, with a rise of over 15% in value. Unlike most shifts in 3D print company value, this rise seems to be associated with a very specific piece of news from the growing manufacturing equipment maker.
I say “manufacturing equipment” rather than “3D printer” because of the announcement. Desktop Metal announced the Figur G15, a sheet metal forming device. Basically, you insert a metal sheet and a press shapes that sheet over top of a dynamically adjustable molding tool. It means a company could very quickly begin making a sheet design without having to incur delays and costs in making tools for manufacturing the item. In a very real sense, the Figur G15 is much like a 3D printer in that you don’t have to use tools to start making things.
The result of this announcement was a dramatic rise in Desktop Metal value the very next trading day, with a resulting boost of 15%, putting “DM” into fourth place on the leaderboard.
Markforged gained 13% in value, most likely due to investors discovering the importance of their recent acquisition of Digital Metal, and the overall market trend this week.
Leader Xometry gained an impressive eleven percent this week, again without any specific news from the company. However, as the market leader in this space, they have begun to attract attention, leading to their boost of US$266M in value this 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.
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.
