Which 3D Printing Company Is The Biggest?

By on March 25th, 2021 in Corporate

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Which 3D Printing Company Is The Biggest?
The biggest 3D print company is? [Image by AD_Images from Pixabay]

This has been a question of mine for some time, so I decided to investigate using science.

There are many ways to define the ā€œbiggestā€ company. It might be the company that sells the highest number of devices. But that wouldnā€™t be fair to 3D print service companies, which donā€™t sell machines at all. This is also nearly impossible to measure because most companies don’t often release the number of machines sold, and never on a regular basis.

It could be the company with the most revenue, but that could be misleading if they are not profitable.

In the end I decided to use ā€œmarket capitalizationā€. This is the value obtained when you add up the cost of every share of a company using the current share price from the stock market. ā€œMarket Capā€ is a frequently used measuring stick for determining the size of a company. Sometimes itā€™s called a ā€œValuationā€, particularly for privately-held companies.

But, yes, there is again another problem. While we can relatively easily determine the market cap for publicly-traded companies, we cannot know the valuation of privately-held companies because, well, they are private. However, with the growing crowd of major players going public, the number of privately-held companies is shrinking, and only a small handful of them could rival the size of the publicly-traded companies.

Sigh, and Iā€™m afraid thereā€™s yet another problem: some companies, like HP or Siemens, are extremely large, and only a tiny sliver of their operations is involved in 3D printing. In some cases, the 3D print activity is single percents of their business. This means itā€™s unfair to compare them directly with companies dedicated to the technology. To solve this dilemma, I simply put them in another category.

As of this writing, this is the ā€œTop Sevenā€ list of 3D print-related companies. These are by far and away the largest publicly-traded companies dedicated to 3D print technologies:

RANKCOMPANYMARKET CAP (US$M)
1Desktop Metal5,129
23D Systems3,362
3Protolabs3,432
4Nano Dimension2,488
5Materialise2,207
6Stratasys1,756
7ExOne728
[Source: Fabbaloo]

Those above are all major players, but there are a few more that have significantly smaller market caps:

RANKCOMPANYMARKET CAP (US$M)
1voxeljet87
2ARC Group WW22
3Aurora Labs15
4Tinkerine4
5Robo2
?MassivitMarket Cap not available
[Source: Fabbaloo]

I know of two companies that apparently are soon to join the ranks of publicly-traded 3D print companies: Markforged and VELO3D. When they appear, theyā€™ll go on our list.

Here is the current list of major 3D print players that are mostly involved in other lines of business:

RANKCOMPANYMARKET CAP (US$M)
1Siemens115,736
2GE114,553
3Autodesk58,899
4Dassault SystĆØmes56,870
5HP38,165
6ANSYS28,174
7PTC15,390
8Kinpo / XYZprinting15,056
9Renishaw6,031
10XEROX3,823
11Groupe Gorge353
12Sindoh273
13Sigma Labs37
14Thermwood11
15RicohMarket Cap not available
[Source: Fabbaloo]

Finally, here is our list of privately-held 3D print companies. Iā€™ve put an asterisk* beside the companies that I would not be surprised would go public at some point in the near future. Note that I donā€™t know anything specific, but given their place in the market it would make sense for them to do so:

Additive Industries*
BCN3D
BigRep*
Carbon*
Creality
EOS
Essentium*
Farsoon
Flashforge
Formlabs*
INTAMSYS
Lithoz
FAME 3D / LulzBot
MakerBot (part of Stratasys)
Markforged*
Photocentric
Prusa Research
Raise3D
SLM Solutions*
Trumpf*
Ultimaker*
UnionTech
VELO3D*
XJet*
[Source: Fabbaloo]

Did I forget a company? No doubt, as there are literally hundreds of 3D print companies, but many are quite small and would not position in the top ranks in any case. Please let me know if you have any additions or corrections and I can see about including them in the next update.

The rankings do change from time to time, as stock prices rise and fall, sometimes dramatically. For example, when you read this report it will automatically be out of date, bit still representative of the situation. When changes do occur in stock prices, changes in the market cap rankings change as well. There will also be new introductions to the lists when companies go public, or removals when a company is acquired.

I will post updates to our list on a regular basis, and next week I’ll take a look at some of the most interesting findings from the list.

By Kerry Stevenson

Kerry Stevenson, aka "General Fabb" has written over 8,000 stories on 3D printing at Fabbaloo since he launched the venture in 2007, with an intention to promote and grow the incredible technology of 3D printing across the world. So far, it seems to be working!

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