It’s time once again to review the status of the major 3D print companies.
Last week saw the introduction of a new feature where I attempted to determine — using science — which 3D printing company is the largest. After some discussion, which you can read here, I decided on the following methodology:
- Rank only publicly traded companies because they have data available
- Ignore privately held companies until they become publicly traded, but there’s a diminishing number of them
- Separate out players that are mostly involved in other businesses
- Rank the companies remaining by their current market capitalization
Two notable companies, Markforged and VELO3D, have announced they will go public. They have not officially done so yet, thus they are not quite on my list yet.
It turns out that the of these 13 companies, seven are notably larger than the rest by orders of magnitude. I’ve separated them into two groups: “Larger” and “Smaller” players. One of the smaller players, Massivit3D, although publicly traded, does not seem to have its market capitalization figure made public.
What does this week look like?
Larger Players
| RANK | COMPANY | MARKET CAP (US$M) |
| 1 | Desktop Metal | 3,603 |
| 2 | 3D Systems | 3,454 |
| 3 | Protolabs | 3,405 |
| 4 | Nano Dimension | 2,151 |
| 5 | Materialise | 1,993 |
| 6 | Stratasys | 1,672 |
| 7 | ExOne | 701 |
| TOTAL | 16,979 |
The big difference from last week is that most of the larger players took a huge bath, losing a staggering US$2.1 billion of market value in only a few days. The biggest loser in the group was the one at the top: Desktop Metal, which lost an incredible US$1.5B in market cap. Note, however, this is NOT a loss in business profit; it only means that investors were not quite as ready to invest as they were the previous week.
The result is a bit of a logjam at the top, with Desktop Metal, 3D Systems and Protolabs with market caps all within “only” US$200M of each other, about six percent.
3D Systems actually gained US$90M on the week, while Stratasys and ExOne dropped slightly.
Why could this be? Often large common price shifts of this type are due to the overall market, which could go up or down and drag individual stocks with it. However, that’s not the case this week; the major indices are all slightly up or flat during the week.
It could be that Desktop Metal, being a freshly minted public investment option, is still finding its level among investors. There is something to be said for “shiny object syndrome”, where the new thing gets attention. It may be that initial investors who saw their fortunes rise have been cashing out while the price was high, ultimately causing a bit of a tumble.
Smaller Players
| RANK | COMPANY | MARKET CAP (US$M) |
| 8 | voxeljet | 95 |
| 9 | ARC Group WW | 21 |
| 10 | Aurora Labs | 12 |
| 11 | Tinkerine | 3 |
| 12 | Robo | 2 |
| TBD | Massivit | TBD |
| TOTAL | 134 |
Among the smaller players there has been little change. This is not only due to their relatively small size, but some of these companies are not particularly active and visible in the market.
Notably, voxeljet rose by almost ten percent. However, the company’s stock price has been all over the place in recent months, rising as high as US$16 in February and as low as US$8 in November.
For this week, the overall total market value of publicly traded 3D print companies is US$17.1B.
