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 | 2,528 | -75 |
| 2 | 3D Systems | 1,176 | -141 |
| 3 | Stratasys | 1,046 | -96 |
| 4 | Protolabs | 1,035 | -67 |
| 5 | Desktop Metal | 1,007 | -98 |
| 6 | Velo3D | 853 | +55 |
| 7 | Materialise | 683 | -65 |
| 8 | Nano Dimension | 641 | -70 |
| 9 | SLM Solutions | 494 | +40 |
| 10 | Markforged | 433 | -60 |
| 11 | FATHOM | 324 | -103 |
| 12 | Massivit | 144 | +13 |
| 13 | Steakholder Foods | 45 | 0 |
| 14 | Shapeways | 37 | -4 |
| 15 | Fast Radius | 36 | -12 |
| 16 | Titomic | 36 | -1 |
| 17 | Freemelt | 31 | -0 |
| 18 | voxeljet | 31 | -5 |
| 19 | AML3D | 11 | +1 |
| 20 | Sigma Additive Solutions | 11 | 0 |
| 21 | Sygnis | 10 | -0 |
| 22 | Aurora Labs | 5 | -0 |
| 23 | Tinkerine | 1 | -0 |
| TOTAL | 10,617 | -687 |
This week saw a dramatic fall in markets overall, to the tune of around five percent, depending on which market you look at. This is quite scary for the 3D print players, as they their value tend to exaggerate the overall market trends. That was certainly the case this week.
Few companies had positive valuation changes this week, and one of them was Massivit, which rose almost ten percent. Considering the overall market drop, this meant that investors saw the valuation really rise by about 15%. But what was so attractive about Massivit?
Again, no immediate news. However, as one of the less followed companies, it’s likely analysts are only now realizing that this company has some amazing new capabilities that are just now being adopted by the automotive industry. In a down week, that’s probably a good time to buy.
Velo3D and SLM Solutions all saw gains in the seven to nine percent range, which is impressive given the lousy market conditions this week. Both of these companies most likely rose on news of a series of notable recent sales of their metal 3D printers to industry. Velo3D alone announced a single company bought seven of their systems this week alone. That’s what it takes to keep a valuation up in this market!
Otherwise, almost all others on the leaderboard suffered valuation losses, sometimes quite significant. The biggest of the week happened to be Fast Radius (a drop of 25%), a company whose value has been bouncing up and down radically in recent months, so perhaps that isn’t that surprising. FATHOM also suffered a 24% drop. Both companies offer manufacturing services, which is quite interesting as you will see shortly.
Both Markforged and voxeljet posted valuation losses of around twelve percent each, with most other companies in the six to ten percent range. Strangely, the low-cap companies were generally less affected by the market moves.
At the top of the leaderboard is Xometry, a company that’s been in that position for several months now. Their valuation has been on a tear, with it growing most weeks — except this one. However, their loss in value this week was less than three percent, less than most of the others.
In spite of that loss, their valuation is now US$2528M, which is more than twice that of 3D Systems in position two on the leaderboard. In fact, Xometry is now worth more than 3D Systems and Stratays COMBINED. That’s quite a statement given that those two companies led the 3D print market for decades.
Why is Xometry, a company providing manufacturing services through a participation network, so much more valued that others like Fast Radius, FATHOM and even Protolabs? My suspicion is that investors see the company growing strongly as their business model could be more flexible in current market conditions. However, while they top the leaderboard today, their current valuation is still well under its peak from last August, when they were valued at US$3476. So getting closer to that prior value might make more sense to investors.
Upcoming Changes
A company set to appear was Essentium, who announced plans to use a SPAC-merger to launch on NASDAQ. However, that deal has been suspended so we’re wondering what the company’s next steps might be.
One company I’ve started to watch is ICON, the Texas-based construction 3D printer manufacturer. This privately-held company has been raising a significant amount of investment to the tune of almost half a billion dollars. At that level it is likely they will be discussing a transition to public markets at some point, which would certainly place them at or near the top of our leaderboard.
Another company that would seem logical to go public is VulcanForms, a manufacturing service using an advanced metal 3D printing process. They are currently privately valued at over US$1B, and going public could cause that to go even higher.
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.
