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 | Bright Laser | $2,394 | -40 |
| 2 | Farsoon | $2,096 | +46 |
| 3 | Xometry | $1,738 | +193 |
| 4 | Proto Labs | $976 | +13 |
| 5 | Stratasys | $808 | +18 |
| 6 | Nano Dimension | $339 | -22 |
| 7 | Materialise | $317 | -0 |
| 8 | Titomic | $264 | +17 |
| 9 | 3D Systems | $235 | -86 |
| 10 | AML3D | $52 | +2 |
| 11 | Aurora Labs | $14 | +0 |
| 12 | Massivit | $7 | +1 |
| 13 | Sygnis | $5 | +1 |
| 14 | Freemelt | $4 | +1 |
| 15 | Steakholder Foods | $2 | -1 |
| TOTAL | $9,251 | +143 |
This week saw very positive results on all major markets, including the tech-heavy NASDAQ. The leaderboard total rose accordingly, but only 1.6%, whereas most of the markets outperformed the leaderboard. This was likely due to one particular problem among leaderboard companies.
That problem was 3D Systems. The venerable inventor of the SLA process, which has been on the market for decades, fell a whopping 27% in value this week.
Why? Their quarterly financials, released last week, showed a decline in revenues of about eight percent over last year. While expenses were also trimmed significantly (14%), this still resulted in an operating loss of close to US$40M, similar to last year. In other words, after all the company’s efforts to reorganize and cut expenses, they haven’t made much headway.
The company’s CEO, Dr. Jeffrey Graves, explained:
“Our first quarter revenues reflect a continuation of challenging top-line pressures as many customers are delaying their capital investments in order to get greater clarity around potential tariff impacts on their manufacturing and distribution strategies. This is in addition to the ongoing geopolitical and broader macroeconomic uncertainty that we have been experiencing for some time. We believe that these factors led to a noticeable dampening of our customers’ near-term capital spending, particularly in consumer-facing and service bureau-related end markets.”
Graves remains optimistic and will continue with the expense savings plan. He said the company has currently “approximately $250 million of cash”, which by my simple arithmetic means they can withstand around seven more quarters of similar results until they run out of cash. However, they will almost certainly have fixed the problem before then, one way or another.
The valuation shift this week caused 3D Systems to fall to ninth place on the leaderboard, the lowest we’ve ever seen them. Now valued at a mere US$235M, the company had once been valued at a now mythical US$4,914. That’s a 95% loss of value over the past several years.
The effects mentioned by Graves are surely being felt by many other 3D print companies, including those not publicly reporting and on our leaderboard.
Rival Stratasys rose a few percent this week, as their financial results also showed a decline in revenue of about six percent. However, Stratasys was able to chop their operating loss in half, which is perhaps why their valuation didn’t suffer as much as 3D Systems’.
Meanwhile, Xometry rose twelve percent, double the market trend. This is due to continued interest in the company since their latest financial report. That report showed they had increased both revenue and profit — they are actually profitable, unlike many others on the leaderboard.
Nano Dimension fell six percent, likely due to the ongoing uncertainty of the outcome of their many acquisitions acquired under previous management.
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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