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 | Bright Laser | $1,586 | -42 |
| 2 | Xometry | $927 | +56 |
| 3 | Farsoon | $847 | -8 |
| 4 | Protolabs | $744 | +34 |
| 5 | Stratasys | $501 | +63 |
| 6 | Nano Dimension | $474 | +15 |
| 7 | 3D Systems | $330 | +81 |
| 8 | Materialise | $288 | -11 |
| 9 | Desktop Metal | $156 | +11 |
| 10 | Titomic | $86 | -3 |
| 11 | BigRep | $57 | -19 |
| 12 | Markforged | $40 | -6 |
| 13 | AML3D | $38 | +7 |
| 14 | Aurora Labs | $16 | +0 |
| 15 | Massivit | $10 | +0 |
| 16 | Freemelt | $8 | -1 |
| 17 | Steakholder Foods | $8 | -0 |
| 18 | Velo3D | $5 | -6 |
| 19 | Sygnis | $4 | -0 |
| TOTAL | $6,124 | +172 |
This week saw terrific results on the overall markets, with exchanges on the positive side. In particular, the NASDAQ was up almost five percent. Did that tech-heavy exchange set the pattern for the 3D print companies this week?
It turns out, maybe so. The leaderboard rose nearly three percent, so that’s not too bad at all. However, in past years the 3D print companies would exaggerate higher level trends. Now that doesn’t happen due to lowered investor confidence in the technology, and that’s what happened this week.
There were a number of big surprises this week among the leaderboard companies. Perhaps the most notable was Velo3D, the manufacturer of high-end metal 3D printers. The company’s valuation has been plummeting for quite a while, and this week they were finally delisted from the NYSE.
Velo3D shifted to the over-the-counter market, where trading still occurs. It’s at a lower level, however, and that means less demand for the stock and an even lower valuation. As of this week, Velo3D is valued at a paltry US$5.4M. That’s low enough that a even small consortium of Fabbaloo readers could put together enough money to buy them, if so desired. My guess is that they will be acquired by someone soon, perhaps even by one of their major customers.
BigRep continued its valuation slide, as has been the case since they went public a few months ago. This week their valuation fell by a huge 25%, leaving them at US$57M. That’s far off from their debut at US$230M.
Enough negative news, let’s move on to the positive side of the ledger. AML3D jumped up 20% on news they have inked a manufacturing license agreement with Blueforce Alliance. This will permit use of their equipment to produce parts for the US Navy, and should lead to increased sales.
Stratasys grew over 14% this week, possibly driven by news their latest 3D printer, the F3300, is achieving good sales. This puts them back in front of rival Nano Dimension, which didn’t grow as much this week.
Meanwhile, 3D Systems jumped an incredible 32% this week, perhaps driven by their most recent financial results. The company’s valuation dropped abruptly some weeks ago, and this week’s boost puts them back to where they had previously stabilized, more or less.
Upcoming Changes
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.
