Exploring the Leading Giants of 3D Printing as of December 2023

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

This week saw very good results among the 3D companies, with the leaderboard rising nearly five percent. That followed the general market trend, which rose a percent or two.

The winner of the week was clearly Xometry, which rose a spectacular 18% this week likely on their previous news of excellent quarterly financial results. It seems that it takes a week or two for the news to seep through the investment analysts.

What’s intriguing is that Xometry’s valuation now tops US$1B for the first time since July. After reaching this peak in February, their valuation took an unexpected dive. It appears they’ve now rebounded.

Another standout this week was Titomic, which typically settles towards the bottom end of the list. This Australian-based firm develops a cold-spray additive manufacturing system designed for heavy-duty industry and military use.

Their valuation this week surged by a staggering 88%.

The Australian stock exchange was so startled by this that they filed an official query with the company, demanding an immediate reply. They wanted to know whether the company was aware of any specific news that could have triggered the abrupt shift in valuation:

ASX: ”Is TTT aware of any information concerning it that has not been announced to the market which, if known by some in the market, could explain the recent trading in its securities?”

TTT: “No, so far as we are aware.”

ASX: ”If the answer to question 1 is “no”, is there any other explanation that TTT may have for the recent trading in its securities?”

TTT: ”No, so far as we are aware.”

So it appears this is a complete mystery, even to Titomic themselves. Nevertheless, some party or parties are buying Titomic stock in such amounts that it has significantly shifted the valuation. This is not unexpected for small cap companies.

Markforged continued to decline in valuation, again because of recent financial results. However, because of the decline they received notice from the NYSE because their share price is too low. This suggests the company will likely have to perform a reverse stock split to correct things. Such actions often trigger negative sentiment with some investors, hence the degraded valuation this week.

Nano Dimension dropped in value this week approximately 6.5%, which is a bit surprising considering they released what seems to be rather positive financials. This may suggest that the company’s value is being driven by other factors, and it’s my understanding that there are a large number of consumer-level investors on this stock.

Upcoming Changes

BigRep announced plans to go public via the SPAC approach, so we will soon see them appear on the leaderboard.

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.

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