Unveiling the Biggest Player in the 3D Printing Industry 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 to 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.

So to say, “market cap” or market capitalization as it’s called, holds a strong significance.

One might argue that there’s no need to regularly follow these corporations as the actual value is determined only when the shares are traded. But, unforeseen events do occur that can either escalate or dwindle their worth. This weekly blog is dedicated to keeping track of such changes.

Do bear in mind that this list doesn’t comprise all major players in the 3D printing realm. The fact is, not all such businesses are publicly traded, meaning we can’t confirm their exact size – EOS being a case in point. Some, such as HP and Siemens, maintain quite substantial 3D print divisions, but these are branches of larger enterprises, thus leaving the exact scale of their 3D print operation unknown.

Now, let’s delve into this week’s group of 3D print businesses.

3D Printing Leaderboard

3D printing valuation leaderboard (in US$M)

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.

Interestingly, Xometry’s valuation has now surpassed US$1B, the first time since July they’ve crossed that boundary. Their valuation hasn’t reached this height since February, after a sudden unexpected drop. It appears they’ve now made a recovery.

Titomic, usually found towards the bottom of the list, saw a meteoric rise this week. The Australian cold-spray additive manufacturing system designed for heavy industry and military applications is their claim to fame.

Their valuation skyrocketed by a staggering 88% this week.

The abrupt increase was so surprising that a formal enquiry was issued by the Australian stock exchange requesting an immediate response from the company. The enquiry sought to verify if any particular news prompted the sudden 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.

Original source