Which 3D print company is the biggest? [Image by Stefan Keller from Pixabay]
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 | 3871 | -133 |
| 2 | Xometry | 2868 | -118 |
| 3 | Desktop Metal | 2122 | -169 |
| 4 | Protolabs | 2009 | -111 |
| 5 | Nano Dimension | 1525 | -72 |
| 6 | Markforged | 1491 | -217 |
| 7 | Stratasys | 1488 | +29 |
| 8 | Materialise | 1365 | -44 |
| 9 | ExOne | 528 | -24 |
| 10 | SLM Solutions | 527 | -31 |
| TOTAL | 17795 | -889 |
This week saw general drops in value for almost all companies on our leaderboard. While the market in general dropped a percent or two over the week, the major players typically shed between three to seven percent of their market capitalization.
There were two exceptions.
First, Markforged dropped almost 13% in value. This is a significant amount, but it may be explainable. Their most recent financial results were good, and as they were released some time ago that would not affect this week’s valuation. However, the company is brand new to the market. They started trading only a few weeks ago, and it may be that its value is still volatile as investors try to find a stable price for the company’s shares.
The second exception was Stratasys, which, unlike the others on the leaderboard, increased in value. It was a modest gain of only US$29M, or about 2%, but still the only positive mark on the leaderboard this week. It’s not clear why Stratasys bucked the negative trend this week, but they remain in position seven.
There were two minor swaps in rank based on small differences in market value. Nano Dimension leapt over Markforged to fifth place as they had a much smaller drop in value than Markforged. Meanwhile, ExOne rose to ninth place over SLM Solutions, but there’s not much to make of that because the companies have essentially the same valuation.
Other Players
| RANK | COMPANY | CAP | CHG |
| 11 | MeaTech 3D | 77 | -8 |
| 12 | voxeljet | 53 | -1 |
| 13 | ARC Group WW | 24 | -1 |
| 14 | Aurora Labs | 18 | +2 |
| 15 | AML3D | 17 | 0 |
| 16 | Tinkerine | 2 | -1 |
| TBD | Massivit | TBD | TBD |
| TOTAL | 192 | -10 |
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 several wild swings in value for the smaller players in 3D printing.
Leader MeaTech 3D dropped almost eleven percent, which Tinkerine dropped almost 24% in value. Meanwhile, Aurora Labs continued their rise in value, chalking up a near 13% rise in value this past week. I’ve long thought that Aurora Labs has a very powerful solution under development, so it may be that investors have begun to notice.
Note that we are unable to obtain Massivit’s market cap value, as it does not seem to be published, even though they are a publicly traded company on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange.
Upcoming Changes
We are still awaiting the appearance on the market of two major companies, Shapeways and VELO3D, both of which are likely to take positions on the major players list.
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.
