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5/20/2013 7:15 PM ET | By Jim Jubak

3 stocks for a 3-D future

3-D printing is here, and in significant ways it represents the future of manufacturing. But each of the 3 prominent publicly traded 3-D printer companies takes a different path to the future.
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We can see the future -- make that futures -- of 3-D printing from here, but which future will it be? You may have seen the video or heard of the stunt in which a group called Defense Distributed fires a gun made with a secondhand 3-D printer. From software instructions, the printer built up the gun from layer after layer of plastic. That has set off a firestorm of protest from people worried about the security implications of a plastic gun that anyone with access to a 3-D printer and the software program, initially distributed on the Internet, can make and that doesn't set off metal scanners. Support comes from people who believe that anyone should have the ability to make a gun or who see this as a logical extension of the Second Amendment right to bear arms. But I think the focus on the use of a 3-D printer to make a gun doesn't recognize the truly disruptive economics of 3D printing technology. Companies will be able to use 3-D printers to make parts for complex and finely tuned industrial products, such as jet engines, that now need to be cast and machined and welded. Not someday, but now. General Electric (GE 0.00%, news) has started using 3-D printing to build fuel nozzles for jet engines. The process involves melting a bed of cobaltchromium powder with lasers and then using 3-D printers to build up the nozzle, thin layer by thin layer, following software instructions. Traditional manufacturing requires welding 20 small pieces together. You will be able to walk into a Staples (SPLS 0.00%, news) store and use a 3-D printer to build a prototype of a chair or a model of a building out of thin layers of paper glued one on top of another and then cut to the right shape by the printer following software instructions. Not someday, but now. The first Staples store to offer the printer and software from private Mcor Technologies opened in the Netherlands in April.

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How 3-D printing works

You'll be able to buy a home printer and create your own one-off "Star Trek" collectibles -- not someday, but now -using software and printers from 3D Systems (DDD 0.00%, news). You -- well, your dentist actually -- will be able to create models of your choppers using 3-D printers and software from Stratasys(SSYS). Not someday, but now. NASDAQ Auto companies will be able to use a 3-D printer to prototype new engines and to produce components for high-pressure fuel injection systems using 3-D printers and software from ExOne (XONE 0.00%, news) -- not someday, but now. S&P Russell 2000 10 Yr Note
Jim Jubak

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3 different approaches
But it's not at all clear which one of those approaches to the 3-D future will grab the biggest share of the 3-D future. Nor do we know which one will lead in building a significant market and which will lag.

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And that's important to you as an investor because each of the three highest-visibility publicly traded 3-D printer companies is emphasizing a different approach to the future. Here's my own survey of the landscape. 3D Systems: P/E 108.4. Market cap $4.86 billion. Q1 revenue $102 million, 31% growth. GAAP earnings of 6 cents a share. 3D does make higher-end printers for production, but I'd say the company is more heavily weighted toward the enthusiast and personal printer market than either Stratasys or ExOne. The company's Cube 3D sells for $1,299, and its ProJet 1000 comes in at $4,000. (I'd call MakerBot and its Replicator series the purest enthusiast play, but the company is still private.) The enthusiast and personal market is certainly an attractive one; it's the part of the 3-D printer market most likely to build the volumes that make Hewlett-Packard's (HPQ 0.00%, news) printer/ink strategy work so well. In 2011, $137 million of the 3-D company's $230 million in revenue came from the sale of printers and $93 million came from the sale of proprietary plastic and powders (the "ink" of the 3-D printer). But the worry is that the personal market will be slow to develop. Very few individuals need to have a $1,299 3-D printer at home. The company's aggressive acquisition strategy, with 30 companies purchased since 2008, makes it hard to tell what the actual organic growth is in this end of the market. Recently, 3D Systems sold stock to raise $250 million. The assumption is that the company has another, comparatively larger, acquisition in mind.

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First 3D-printed gun fires shot

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No more plaster molds

Stratasys: P/E 158.8. Market cap $3.5 billion. Q1 revenue $98 million. 2013 projected revenue $430 to $445 million. 2013 projected GAAP loss of 16 cents to 41 cents a share. I'd say that Stratasys emphasizes the First 3D-printed gun fires professional market, although the company certainly sells shot its Fortus line of production systems. That emphasis got 5/6/13 4:57 more pronounced with the merger of Stratasys and Objet.

For example, one of the products being pushed after the merger is the Objet 3 OrthoDesk, a 3-D printer for the orthodontic market. An orthodontist will be able to create models of a patient's teeth and then, using the printer, turn those into the specific dental applications that the patient needs. No more plaster molds that have to be turned into casts and then made by hand into braces, bridges, replacement teeth and other dental aids. The physical molds won't have to be stored, either, so that they can be retrieved for future work for the same patient. Now the information contained in the physical mold can be stored digitally. A joint venture between a 3-D printer company like Stratasys and a 2-D printer company like Hewlett-Packard would seem a natural. After all, the established 2-D printer company has the sales channels and customer support to push a product like the Objet 30 -- or Stratasys Idea line of personal printers -- into the marketplace. The two companies thought so, too, and they formed a partnership that would do exactly that. TICKERS IN THIS ARTICLE
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But they dissolved that effort relatively quickly for reasons that, to me, seem unclear. Stratasys has said only that the effort didn't work and that the two companies agreed to part ways. My suspicion -- and that's really all it is at this point is that the two companies discovered that the early stage of development in the 3-D printer market didn't fit together all that well with the mature 2-D printer market. No one needs to explain to a customer how a 2-D printer works or to spend time persuading a business to make the leap of putting a 2D printer on a desktop. Yet that is exactly what the 3-D market demands at this point; the potential 3-D printer customer needs convincing and hand-holding and semi-customization of the product to business needs.

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0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 Hewlett-Packard's marketing apparatus is admirably suited to selling the mature 2-D printer, but selling 3-D printers would require significant retooling of that marketing force. The Hewlett-Packard association with a 3-D printer would work to persuade hesitant customers, but only if those customers had a satisfying rather than frustrating experience with the Hewlett-Packard sales and support teams.

Youth and immaturity

ExOne: Forward P/E 56.3. Market cap $561 million. Q1 revenue $7.9 million. GAAP loss 20 cents a share. ExOne is

so newly public and so young as a company that it's dangerous to draw conclusions about the company's exact focus. (ExOne would probably not have been able to go public at such an early stage except that the stock market success of Stratasys, and especially 3D Systems, created investor demand for more opportunities to invest in 3-D technology.) But with that caveat, I'd say that the capabilities and higher unit price of the company's printers indicate a focus on the industrial prototyping and production end of the market. The example that I cited earlier -- the use of a 3-D printer to prototype new automobile engines and to produce components for high-pressure fuel injection systems -- is indicative of the company's market direction at this point in its life. The very youth and immaturity of ExOne helps focus the key question about investing in 3-D printer companies. Certainly, 3D Systems has become a momentum-investing favorite; the stock's 108 price-to-earnings ratio reflects that. But considering how speculative projections of growth rates are and how uncertain the economics are -- for example, how much money will these companies need to raise to build the sales force required to advance them from their current near R&D stage? -- it's hard to come up with a way to put a fundamental value on any of these companies or to pick one as having come up with the winning approach to the developing 3-D printer market.

The Chinese wild card

And then, of course, there's the Chinese wild card. The Chinese government and Chinese industry certainly aren't blind to the future of 3-D printing or its capacity to profoundly reorder the world's manufacturing economy. There's ample evidence that China's government has targeted 3-D printing as a key future technology. For example, a Beijing University research team, working on 3-D production for aircraft parts, won a national award from the State Council for Technological Achievement in January. Given how important this technology is likely to be and the extreme difficulty in calling a winner at this stage, I think investors have two choices. First, in the short term, you can simply trade these stocks as you would any hot momentum play. Buy and sell as the short-term trend indicators suggest. This won't give you a lasting or increasing exposure to the sector, but you will stay on top of trends and, to the degree that you aren't a purely technical trader of these shares, you'll gradually increase your familiarity with the companies in the still very early stage market. Second, you could take a more long-term, venture capital approach and put together a portfolio in the sector. Venture capitalists expect that of 10 bets they make, some will simply not play out and may actually lose money; some will do no better than break even; some will result in a two- to three-fold return; and a very few will turn into a seven- or eight- or even a 10-bagger. The keys to making this approach work are: Even though you are building a portfolio, you still do due diligence and try to pick the best companies in the sector, given your understanding of the limits of your knowledge. You make sure that your portfolio truly covers all the bases in the emerging sector. If the future surprisingly zigs, you'd like to own a piece of it. Price matters. It's a whole lot easier for a $500 million market-cap stock to turn into a $5 billion market-cap stock than it is for a $10 billion market-cap stock to go to $100 billion.

How 3-D printing works

Building a 3-D portfolio

To build my 3-D portfolio now, I'd like to include the three stocks highlighted above, with an idea of buying some ExOne now and more later if the shares drop on the end of post-IPO lockups that prevent selling by insiders and early round investors. I'd like to get 3D Systems cheaper than it is now, but I wouldn't wait for it to get absolutely cheap. It and Stratasys are volatile, and I think you'll have plenty of drops for buying both. And, of course, keep your eyes open for new entrants into the field that deserve a place in your sector portfolio. Like most truly disruptive technologies, the 3-D printer story isn't all sunshine and lollipops, from a macro perspective. First, the technology will eliminate high-paying manufacturing jobs. A company might indeed save money by using 3-D printing technology to prototype and produce complex components, but that will also result in the elimination of highly skilled practical engineering and production jobs. Long term, I don't know if the new jobs created in software design, for example, will balance out the jobs lost, but it's clear that the skilled workers who lose their jobs because of the adoption of this technology won't be hired for the new jobs created by this technology. In other words, 3-D printing technology will clearly worsen the problem whereby older skilled workers in relatively highly paid jobs lose those jobs and lack the skills required by newly created positions. Second, 3-D-printer technology will make the inadequacies in the world's apparatus for protecting intellectual property even worse. How do you protect a design when software engineers can turn it into code, and then either print the product themselves or put the code on the Internet for all to print? And when a "unique" product exists as code, then what exactly are the criteria for intellectual property that are eligible for protection? The global economy never works out the solutions to problems like these before a disruptive technology is let loose on the world. And there's no reason to think that we'll do better this time. 3-D printing is coming. It is the future. The big questions are what that future will look like and how long it will take to

arrive.

Updates to Jubak's picks

These recent blog posts contain updates to the stocks in Jubak's market-beating portfolios: Toyota motors ahead Milestones for the yen and the Nikkei More people filling Home Inns Rough first quarter for Statoil MGM Resorts tops earnings expectations When Jubak started the mutual fund he manages, Jubak Global Equity Fund (JUBAX +0.20%, news), in 2010, he liquidated all his individual stock holdings and put the money into the fund. The fund did not own shares of any stock mentioned in this column as of the end of March. Find a full list of the stocks in the fund's portfolio as of the end of March here. Jim Jubak's column has run on MSN Money since 1997. He is the author of the book "The Jubak Picks," based on his market-beating Jubak's Picks portfolio; the writer of the Jubak's Picks blog; and the senior markets editor at MoneyShow.com. Get a free 60-day trial subscription to JAM, his premium investment letter, by using this code: MSN60 when you register at the Jubak Asset Management website. Click here to find Jubak's most recent articles, blog posts and stock picks.

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7 Comments
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KOO

10 hours ago

First, Jim Jubak, you wascally wabbit, you finally returned to your roots and wrote an incredibly welldone expose on 3D printing that I haven't seen any other author attempt. Bravo!! Second, I won't be interested in this until I see a company specializing in a product produced in 3D. For example, a printing company that starts selling multicolored plastic guns that hold 15 rounds in a clip. Jim opened my eyes. The only real play here is General Electric. The rest have no focus. 2 2 Replies (1)

dave1230

15 hours ago

Now we are talking real tech. 3D printing technology has huge Potential. This can literally change the innovation landscape moving forward. As the price comes down, this can level the playing field against the Big Boys. Not picking any stock winners, but excited about the possibilities. 2 2 Replies (3)

psychedout

11 hours ago

3D systems will have a huge impact with trademark and patent laws. Intellectual property rights will be compromised further with rampant copying of patented items and designs further weakening the recouping of design and developmental costs. The intrusion into things such as medical device copying could very well lead to consumer injury who purchase, unaware that they are using a copy and not a properly engineered and constructed device because it was cheaper to "print" it than purchase through the usual channels. 1 1 Replies (0)

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