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 | Xometry | 2,045 | -259 |
| 2 | 3D Systems | 1,447 | -169 |
| 3 | Stratasys | 1,229 | -77 |
| 4 | Protolabs | 1,217 | -60 |
| 5 | Desktop Metal | 1,026 | -28 |
| 6 | Nano Dimension | 839 | -82 |
| 7 | Velo3D | 799 | -203 |
| 8 | Materialise | 706 | -106 |
| 9 | FATHOM | 522 | -42 |
| 10 | Markforged | 490 | -51 |
| 11 | SLM Solutions | 260 | -27 |
| 12 | Massivit | 79 | -7 |
| 13 | Fast Radius | 49 | -10 |
| 14 | Shapeways | 45 | -1 |
| 15 | Steakholder Foods | 45 | 0 |
| 16 | voxeljet | 42 | +0 |
| 17 | Freemelt | 38 | -3 |
| 18 | AML3D | 14 | -5 |
| 19 | Sigma Additive Solutions | 11 | 0 |
| 20 | Sygnis | 10 | -0 |
| 21 | Aurora Labs | 7 | +2 |
| 22 | Tinkerine | 2 | -0 |
| TOTAL | 10,921 | -1130 |
This week saw big shifts in the overall market. First rising, and then falling back to prior levels, the market seems to have caused similar and, as usual, exaggerated dips in the 3D printing companies. This is not unexpected, given last week’s ridiculous bump. It’s likely that some investors decided to cash in this week while they were ahead.
This all meant there were substantial dips in the valuations this week. Only one company realized substantial gains, and that was the small Australian company, Aurora Labs. As usual, there was no news this week to drive the company’s valuation up multiple double digits, but it could be that some investors see them as similar to another Australian metal 3D printer manufacturer, AML3D, which saw substantial gains recently. It may be that Aurora Labs is getting a bit of shine from their neighboring company.
But aside from Aurora Labs, most companies’ valuations were down this week, sometimes substantially. Velo3D, Fast Radius and AML3D all suffered valuation dips exceeding 15%. However, these companies are also well known for their extreme volatility. Velo3D, for example, dropped weekly for months, only to bounce up sharply recently as investors finally realized what the company was actually doing. However, some of those Velo3D investors seem to have been fragile this week. As a result of this dip, Velo3D was leapfrogged by Nano Dimension on the leaderboard as that company’s weekly devaluation was slightly less than Velo3D’s.
Plenty of other companies incurred valuation losses in the 5-10% range, and there’s not much more to it than being dragged down by the overall market. In fact, August is perhaps the quietest month for news in the 3D print world, so there’s not much within the space to drive these effects.
I’m now looking forward to September and beyond.
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.
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.
