Who’s The Biggest In 3D Printing, January 23, 2022

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	2301	-112
2	3D Systems	2167	-387
3	Stratasys	1428	-146
4	FATHOM	1392	+319
5	Protolabs	1362	-27
6	Desktop Metal	1092	-261
7	Materialise	1067	-138
8	Velo3D	991	-33
9	Markforged	913	+2
10	Nano Dimension	806	-117
11	SLM Solutions	388	-37
12	Shapeways	153	+31
13	Massivit	109	-11
14	MeaTech 3D	80	-4
15	Freemelt	53	-1
16	voxeljet	41	-4
17	Aurora Labs	13	0
18	AML3D	10	0
19	Tinkerine	2	0
	TOTAL	12064	-3227

This week saw dramatic shifts, not only in the larger markets overall, but particularly in our 3D print company tracker. As the market in general goes, so goes these companies, and often in more dramatic fashion. The total value of our leaderboard plummeted by over US$3B in a single week.

We have a new leader! After heading the list for 25 weeks, Xometry has topped 3D Systems as the biggest 3D print company on our list. While both companies lost value this week, 3D Systems’ loss of US$387M was far more than Xometry’s “mere” US$112M drop.

Another significant change on the leaderboard was the movement of FATHOM, a recent entry, which rocketed up from seventh to now fourth place, only slightly behind long time player Stratasys. FATHOM was the big winner of the week with a massive gain of almost 30% in value. This is due to their recent entry and investors are still finding a stable level for the company.

However, both FATHOM and Xometry are in the manufacturing business, and that niche seems to be of particular interest to investors over machine producers. It may be that investors see these companies as growth targets as they could provide manufacturing capacity to companies suffering from supply chain issues. However, as has happened in the past, the real money was in selling shovels to the miners, so perhaps the 3D printer manufacturers are undervalued.

Other odd moves this week included Desktop Metal, whose value dropped almost 20% over the week. As usual, there were no announcements that would trigger this change from the company, aside from a new metal material offered for their Production system. As you can see in this chart, Desktop Metal’s value has been consistently dropped for most of a year. This is in spite of the company making a number of strategic acquisitions that make them among the industry leaders in breadth of product offering.

Finally, Shapeways took a massive 25% gain over the week. This is extremely surprising, given that the company has been consistently dropping in value for weeks, and particularly during a market down week. The company’s fortunes changed the day after news emerged that they had deployed a new and improved quality assurance program. This multi-step process should assure clients their parts are in good condition on each order. Could this be the first step in a turnaround in value of the company?

Upcoming Changes

We are still awaiting the appearance on the market of one more 3D print company: 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.