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In-Depth Information
3D printing and the stock market
Just like 3D printing as a concept has had a hype in recent years, 3D printing stocks had a
big hype in 2013. All share prices had big increases and two more “pure play” stocks: Ex-
one and Voxeljet were listed in 2013. 3D Systems' shares increased by 161 % and somewhat
smaller Swedish Arcam increased even more, 465 % in 2013. Eventually critics started to
make the case for a “3D printing bubble” and share prices retreated substantially in 2014.
Although there were very few listed 3D printing companies at the time, the first 3D printing
mutual fund: “3D Printing and Technology Fund” was launched in January 2014. The man
behind it was Alan Meckler a former internet pioneer that now is seeing similar develop-
ment in 3D printing, his company Mediabistro arranges the “Inside 3D Printing Conference
and Expo”.
There are only a handful of pure play 3D printing stocks, but there are many companies that
are associated to or involved in 3D printing in some way although their main source of in-
come is derived from other areas. It is quite hard to categorize these companies and to decide
where to draw the line: which stock is 3D printing or not? One example is General Electric
(GE), a behemoth of a company, with over 300 000 employees. In the end of 2012 they ac-
quired Morris Technologies a company with 130 employees. Morris Technologies was 3D
printing parts for jet engines delivered to a GE project. Since GE own this small company
which is doing 3d printing manufacturing, should they be considered a 3d printing stock or
not? Or software companies like Dassault Systems (the company behind Solidworks) and
Autodesk, are they 3D printing stocks? Surely a part of the files that are created with Solid-
works and Inventor are used for 3D printing but most of them are not at this stage.
In the table below are a few pure play or near pure play stocks from different countries:
