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 take a look at the 3D printing companies on this week’s list.
3D Printing Leaderboard
| RANK | COMPANY | CAP | CHG |
| 1 | 3D Systems | 2884 | -50 |
| 2 | Xometry | 1941 | -113 |
| 3 | Desktop Metal | 1667 | -140 |
| 4 | Stratasys | 1601 | -30 |
| 5 | Materialise | 1451 | +84 |
| 6 | Protolabs | 1405 | +38 |
| 7 | Velo3D | 1377 | -280 |
| 8 | Nano Dimension | 1033 | -45 |
| 9 | Markforged | 942 | -33 |
| 10 | SLM Solutions | 380 | -38 |
| 11 | Shapeways | 175 | +1 |
| 12 | Massivit | 108 | -11 |
| 13 | MeaTech 3D | 81 | +2 |
| 14 | voxeljet | 46 | -4 |
| 15 | Aurora Labs | 13 | 0 |
| 16 | AML3D | 10 | -1 |
| 17 | Tinkerine | 2 | 0 |
| TOTAL | 15036 | -623 |
This week saw a four percent loss in the total valuation on our leaderboard, meaning most companies saw losses. Some companies saw rather substantial losses, however.
The most notable mover was none other than Velo3D, which saw a near 17 percent drop in value. This moved the company from fourth place last week all the down to seventh position, just above Nano Dimension.
Why such a large drop? There does not appear to be any particularly bad news about the company this week, but the drop appears to be a continuation of a long term pattern. Remember that Velo3D is quite new to the stock market, having become tradable only this October.
New companies to the market often have substantial variability in their pricing as investors struggle to find a stable level, and investor knowledge of the company can be limited.
In this case Velo3D soared in the weeks after their debut, with a stratospheric valuation exceeding US$2.2B during one week in November. However, that peak in value evidently was higher than acceptable for most investors, as the company’s valuation has dropped most weeks since then, including this week’s substantial drop of US$280M. At some point the valuation will stabilize, and it may rise as investors discover the company’s unique advantages in metal 3D printing technology.
Another company suffering a significant loss was AML3D, the Australian maker of a metal 3D printing system, which saw a drop of more than ten percent in value. This is quite surprising, as the company announced they’ve successfully 3D printed the world’s largest metal part for the oil and gas industry. Perhaps this drop is due to generally poor results on the Australian market this week: tech stocks tend to gain or lose multiples of any overall market trend.
Some of the smaller companies frequently see quite dramatic ups and downs in their valuation, often defying logic, or at least from what I understand about the companies. I have to assume macro market trends affects them greatly.
This week’s winner appears to be Materialise, which managed to grow their valuation by almost seven percent. This could be due to their announcement of the ability of their upcoming Magics 26 AM suite to include direct CAD capabilities. This could attract more users to their product, and at the same time prevent defections to the increasing large number of software competitors. This gain moved Materialise up to fifth place on the leaderboard.
Upcoming Changes
We are still awaiting the appearance on the market of two other 3D print companies. One is FATHOM, a digital manufacturer, which has been developing a SPAC (Special Purpose Acquisition Company) maneuver to complete later this year. The other is Fast Radius, a digital manufacturing cloud service.
Another company set to appear in early 2022 is Essentium, who announced plans to use a SPAC-merger to launch on NASDAQ.
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, 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.
