3D printing stocks, Q1 2025: Nano's new board inherits two deals and a fight
The first quarter of 2025 handed Nano Dimension’s new leadership an awkward inheritance. The board and interim CEO that the activist Murchinson had installed in December 2024 did not sign the Desktop Metal and Markforged acquisitions. The people they replaced did. Now they had to close them.
That was not a formality. Nano and Desktop Metal spent the period at odds over the terms of their own merger, including whether Nano could pay less than first agreed. The original July 2024 deal for Desktop Metal carried a price that could be adjusted downward, and the gap between the sticker number and what Nano now wanted to pay turned into open legal conflict rather than a quiet closing. A buyer trying to renegotiate a signed deal downward, with new management that never wanted the deal, is not a normal acquisition. It is two distressed companies arguing over how distressed each one is.
Underneath the legal noise, the strategic question was already visible. If the new board did not believe in the acquisitions, why finish them at all? The answer, which showed up later in 2025, was that it would finish them and then start unwinding parts, which is an expensive way to end up roughly where you started.
The deals did close the following quarter, and Markforged left the public market when they did. That is the Q2 2025 story. The board fight that set this up is Q4 2024; live prices are on our stocks page.