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 | Farsoon | $5,343 | -242 |
| 2 | Xometry | $4,775 | +347 |
| 3 | Bright Laser | $3,004 | -986 |
| 4 | Shining 3D | $2,459 | 0 |
| 5 | Proto Labs | $1,878 | +150 |
| 6 | Creality | $1,560 | +118 |
| 7 | Stratasys | $774 | +6 |
| 8 | Velo3D | $760 | +288 |
| 9 | 3D Systems | $489 | +61 |
| 10 | Materialise | $386 | -16 |
| 11 | Nano Dimension | $312 | -15 |
| 12 | Titomic | $254 | -12 |
| 13 | 6K Additive | $86 | +9 |
| 14 | AML3D | $57 | -2 |
| 15 | Massivit | $21 | -1 |
| 16 | Aurora Labs | $19 | -0 |
| 17 | Sygnis | $9 | +1 |
| 18 | Freemelt | $6 | +2 |
| 19 | Steakholder Foods | $2 | -0 |
| TOTAL | $22,193 | -292 |
This week saw flat results overall on Western markets, while the Chinese SSE actually rose a couple of percent. However, our leaderboard fell just over a percent in total. There were a number of rather dramatic shifts this week.
The biggest move of the week by far was Velo3D, which had a valuation gain of an astonishing 60%. This was almost certainly due to their relationship with SpaceX, which just happened to issue the biggest IPO in history this week. SpaceX raised an enormous amount of money and set a staggering valuation of around US$2T (T, not B).
It turns out, however, that Velo3D technology is SpaceX’s primary method of 3D printing advanced metal rocket engines. Their relationship is so tight that a few years ago when Velo3D was in financial trouble, SpaceX actually struck a deal with them to take over the 3D print tech if things went south.
Because of the extremely tight relationship, investors view Velo3D as a liquid adjacent option for SpaceX. If you can’t buy SpaceX, buy Velo3D, they are thinking.
They’re not wrong: as SpaceX expands their operations when they finally get Starship perfected, they will need a great amount of metal 3D printing — and it will come from Velo3D.
Meanwhile, Bright Laser fell 25% this week. There was no particular news from the company to drive this effect, but it is possibly due to investors profit-taking after the company’s long bull run. In addition, a recent analyst report this week stated their P/E ratio at over 100, which is pushing the envelope.
Creality, trading only for a few weeks now, is still experiencing the shine of their market debut with an eight percent gain this week. It also didn’t hurt that they recently announced a new waste-free technology, KliTek, which puts the company right up there with the few others that have similar tech.
3D Systems unexpectedly rose 14% this week. It was unexpected because the company had issued new shares, causing a dilution: shares would be worth less afterwards. Normally, that causes the market capitalization to drop. However, in this case, it did the reverse. It is possible that investors saw that the issuance was more positive (bringing in new cash) than the negative of the dilution. In other words, we’ll take some dilution, and that’s better than a balance-sheet crisis.
Curiously, Xometry rose eight percent, also while issuing new shares. However, there’s a difference: Xometry is in a position of financial strength, while 3D Systems is not. It’s likely that investors treated the Xometry shares as “growth capital”, rather than “desperation capital”.
Finally, a word about a new entry on the leaderboard, Shining 3D. It seems their valuation has not been changing, and after some investigation, I have determined what’s going on. The company WAS trading on the Chinese NEEQ board, but then applied to trade on the Beijing Stock Exchange. As a result, trading was suspended at the valuation we see. It’s somewhat like an IPO of a company that’s already tradable, a very unique situation.
For our purposes, the company clearly has a publicly validated valuation from the NEEQ exchange, so we’re going to go with that until they activate trading on the new exchange.
Upcoming Changes
We’ve heard very little about companies intending to become publicly traded recently. This is due to the ongoing lack of investor interest in the technology. The technology’s reputation has suffered immensely in the investment community because of multiple large-scale investment failures in the past few years.
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.
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