Who’s The Biggest In 3D Printing, October 22, 2023 « Fabbaloo

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	Stratasys	801	+13
2	Xometry	761	-60
3	Nano Dimension	706	+30
4	Protolabs	654	-14
5	3D Systems	593	+76
6	Desktop Metal	372	-16
7	Materialise	299	+2
8	Velo3D	295	+22
9	Markforged	209	-34
10	Massivit	29	-1
11	FATHOM	22	-3
12	Steakholder Foods	17	-1
13	Shapeways	14	-5
14	Freemelt	14	+2
15	voxeljet	12	+2
16	AML3D	10	-1
17	Titomic	7	-0
18	Sygnis	4	-1
19	Aurora Labs	4	+0
20	Sigma Additive Solutions	3	-1
	TOTAL	4,827	+10

This week saw was pretty flat, a perhaps welcome change from the very dramatic volatility over the past couple of weeks. The leaderboard total was up by far less than one percent.

We have a change at the top of the board this week: Stratasys has regained the number one position, leaping over Xometry, which snatched the title last week. It seems that the Xometry rise was then followed by some profit-taking, which diminished their value sufficient for second place.

Stratasys rose slight, and that was just enough for them to slide into position one. But what about their takeover rivals, Nano Dimension and 3D Systems? Nano Dimension rose almost five percent this week, beating the average. This could be due to the announcement of board changes at the company. During the Stratasys takeover saga, there were questions raised about the composition of the company’s board, so perhaps investors saw that change positively. Nano Dimension is in third spot on the leaderboard.

3D Systems rose a very healthy 15% this week, recovering some of the value lost during the takeover period. It may be that investors view the avoidance of a merger positively. However, the company still remains in fifth spot on the leaderboard.

Desktop Metal, the company that Stratasys management wanted to merge with but was stymied by a negative shareholder vote, continued its downward trend. This could be happening because the merger would have benefited the company, raising its value. However, that’s not happening.

Shapeways dropped almost 24% in value this week. There was no specific news to drive this shift, but the company has now reached the bottom level it hit this spring. During the summer there was a run-up of the stock price, but now that seems to have dissipated completely.

Finally, we have Sigma Additive, which I was very curious about this week. The company surprisingly announced that it was abruptly leaving the additive manufacturing software business and transforming into a consumer travel company. Yes, this is an actual thing: read our story about it.

The result this week was not unexpected: their valuation dropped by 26%. Hopefully they will gain some value in that other business, but going forward we’ll have to remove them from the leaderboard.

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.