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 | 1,021 | +52 |
| 2 | Xometry | 973 | +125 |
| 3 | 3D Systems | 830 | +12 |
| 4 | Protolabs | 784 | +24 |
| 5 | Nano Dimension | 749 | +28 |
| 6 | SLM Solutions | 642 | +4 |
| 7 | Desktop Metal | 575 | +74 |
| 8 | Materialise | 390 | -2 |
| 9 | Velo3D | 311 | +6 |
| 10 | Markforged | 264 | +28 |
| 11 | FATHOM | 61 | +1 |
| 12 | Steakholder Foods | 45 | 0 |
| 13 | Massivit | 37 | +3 |
| 14 | Shapeways | 23 | +3 |
| 15 | Freemelt | 18 | -0 |
| 16 | AML3D | 16 | +2 |
| 17 | Sigma Additive Solutions | 11 | 0 |
| 18 | voxeljet | 11 | -0 |
| 19 | Titomic | 10 | -3 |
| 20 | Sygnis | 5 | -0 |
| 21 | Aurora Labs | 3 | -1 |
| TOTAL | 6,780 | +356 |
This week was good for the overall markets, with indexes rising between one and three percent, and with more weight towards technical stocks. Normally, this would bode well for 3D print company valuations. Was this case?
Yes, indeed. The leaderboard’s total rose by a very healthy 5.5%, following the normal pattern of exaggerating larger trends.
But, as usual, some companies benefited more from the boost this week, and some did not.
On the positive side we have Shapeways, which rose by a whopping 18% this week. This is most likely due to investment analysts finally noticing that the company released financial results two weeks ago. There they reported a significant gain of 40% in the software sector, and the announcement of multiple industrial deals. The company has a “path to profitability”, which they hope will continue over the next 12 months. However, the company is still reporting quarterly losses, and in fact they grew somewhat over last year.
Desktop Metal rose almost 15% this week. Their financials were released a month ago, so the promising information in that release has already been accounted for in the company’s valuation by investors. However, as the talks between 3D Systems and Stratasys regarding a merger seem to have gone quiet, it may be that investors are more positive on Desktop Metal’s merger with Stratasys going forward.
Markforged leapt upwards almost twelve percent this week. Their financials were released two weeks ago, and again slow analysts may finally be looking at them. The financials showed that Markforged is mostly flat in terms of revenue, margin, etc., which is a lot better than the negative turn of some other companies. Therefore it may be that investors see that as a positive sign.
Xometry continued its upward motion, this week jumping another 15% skyward. The company suffered an abrupt loss of value some months ago, but has been slowly recovering since then. They had been in position one on the leaderboard for many months, but fell to fourth after the drop. Now we find the company in second spot.
At the top we still have Stratasys, whose value was inflated by recent takeover proposals. They’re still maintaining that position, and this week even enlarged the gap between them and rival takeover participant 3D Systems. At this point Stratasys is 23% larger than 3D Systems in terms of valuation.
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.
