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 | 3757 | -114 |
| 2 | Xometry | 2603 | -265 |
| 3 | Protolabs | 2108 | +99 |
| 4 | Desktop Metal | 2012 | -109 |
| 5 | Nano Dimension | 1523 | -2 |
| 6 | Stratasys | 1502 | +14 |
| 7 | Markforged | 1443 | -48 |
| 8 | Materialise | 1383 | +18 |
| 9 | ExOne | 522 | -6 |
| 10 | SLM Solutions | 476 | -51 |
| TOTAL | 17329 | -465 |
This week saw a mixed bag of results. Some companies were up, while others were down. Two companies in particular suffered a near ten percent loss in value, Xometry and SLM Solutions.
Xometry is a curious case. This week they released their quarterly financials, which is likely the source of the valuation dip. Inspecting the numbers, there doesn’t seem to be anything notably different from prior releases: the company is currently suffering quarterly losses, but has big plans to occupy a major portion of the manufacturing space in the future.
Their drop in valuation is likely due to a slight mismatch of investor expectations versus the stated results, resulting in a drop in the stock price. In addition, Xometry is a very new stock to the market and may have some ongoing volatility until a base value is identified.
The other near-ten percent loss was incurred by SLM Solutions. Their loss is a bit of a mystery to me, as they had no big news this week, aside from announcing a large sale that included one of their massive NXG XII 600 machines.
Desktop Metal slipped to fourth place due to a five percent drop as compared to Protolabs’ five percent gain. The two companies have been trading positions over the past few months.
Finally, Stratasys stepped over Markforged with a slight gain to take over sixth place on our leaderboard.
Other Players
| RANK | COMPANY | CAP | CHG |
| 11 | MeaTech 3D | 82 | +5 |
| 12 | voxeljet | 51 | -2 |
| 13 | ARC Group WW | 21 | -4 |
| 14 | Aurora Labs | 18 | 0 |
| 15 | AML3D | 17 | 0 |
| 16 | Tinkerine | 2 | 0 |
| TBD | Massivit | TBD | TBD |
| TOTAL | 191 | -1 |
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 notable gain by leader MeaTech 3D, which bioprints meat products made from cells cultured in labs, not animals. They announced one of their subsidiaries had been able to produced 700g of cultured chicken fat cells in a single production run. This is a significant milestone in the company’s path towards producing edible cultured meat products, as meat is composed of both muscle and fat cells.
Aurora Labs vaulted over AML3D into 14th place, again due to increasing interest in their powerful metal 3D printing process.
One surprise this week was a drop in value by voxeljet, to the tune of four percent. I found this quite surprising, given the company announced this week they had made arrangements to develop a massive 3D printer dedicated to efficiently manufacturing offshore wind turbine components. This development should put voxeljet in a unique position in a market that is exploding. In spite of that announcement, the company’s stock managed to fall.
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.
