Who’s The Biggest In 3D Printing, April 14, 2024

By on April 14th, 2024 in Corporate, news

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Who's The Biggest In 3D Printing
Which 3D print company is the biggest this week? [Image by Stefan Keller from Pixabay]
Who's The Biggest In 3D Printing
Which 3D print company is the biggest this week? [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.

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

RANKCOMPANYCAPCHG
1Xometry843-24
2Protolabs830-52
3Stratasys704-50
4Nano Dimension578-15
53D Systems494-41
6Desktop Metal315+7
7Materialise300-5
8Markforged133-9
9Velo3D83-36
10Massivit40-0
11Titomic38-1
12FATHOM31-0
13AML3D13+4
14Steakholder Foods13-1
15Shapeways12-0
16Freemelt11-2
17Aurora Labs6+0
18Sygnis4+0
TOTAL4,447-350
3D printing valuation leaderboard (in US$M) [Source: Fabbaloo]

This week saw more dismal results for the companies on the leaderboard. The markets overall were down, and so was the leaderboard total, to the tune of 7.5%, which is significant. The leaderboard total is now US$4.4B, vastly less than its high point back in 2021 at US$21B. However, this week was not the low point, which was reached in October when the leaderboard hit US$4.2B.

The winner of the week was likely AML3D, which seems to have rose over 40% in value this week. However, while that seems like a big number, it really isn’t because of AML3D’s small size. The bump seems to be related to their announcement of ISO9100 certification, which opens the door to huge sales to aerospace companies of their metal 3D printing systems. It’s also important to note that the company’s value recently dropped, so this week’s bump is merely heading back up towards that value.

Velo3D fell 30% this week, which is quite significant. The sudden shift is not due to the company’s historic volatility, but rather could be related to the announcement of closing of a public share offering of around US$12M. This presumably added shares to the company, diluting the value of existing shares, hence the drop in value.

Steakholder Foods continues its downward trajectory, and that wasn’t helped by their recent 10-1 reverse stock split. This was required because their share price shrank to a level too small for the markets to accept. That’s always a bad signal, and it’s reflected in their decreasing valuation.

At the top of the leaderboard, Xometry has regained position one from Protolabs. Xometry had long been on top, but fell precipitously some months ago. Since then the stock’s value has been gradually recovering, and this week the valuation finally surpassed rival Protolabs.

Both manufacturing services make heavy use of 3D printing, and it’s interesting to note that between the two companies, their valuations represent a whopping 37% of the entire leaderboard.

The traditionally large companies have all fell enormously from previous highs. 3D Systems, for example, is worth only about 10% of what it was once worth, only a few years ago. Others are in similar positions. It’s surprising that the entire leaderboard is now valued at the price of single companies from 2021 and earlier.

Stratasys remains the top 3D printer manufacturer on the leaderboard, ahead of Nano Dimension by US$126M, and ahead of 3D Systems by US$210 (42% larger).

Upcoming Changes

BigRep announced plans to go public via the SPAC approach, so we will soon see them appear on the leaderboard.

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.

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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