Cooking the Books: Saudi Aramco IPO Overvalued by 500%?

The most hyped IPO ever – but what will buyers actually get?
The world’s most valuable oil company, Saudi Aramco, is approaching its first IPO in 2018, as the government of Saudi Arabia prepares to sell off portions of the company in order fill a sovereign wealth fund crucial to the country’s transition away from an oil-based economy.
Saudi Aramco is worth $2 trillion, according to Riyadh, and its five percent initial offering could yield $200 billion. This would be the largest IPO in history, blowing away the offering of China’s Alibaba in 2014.
The problem, however, is that the company itself may not be worth as much as the Saudi government claims. Recent reports and growing skepticism regarding Aramco’s actual worth have cast some doubts on whether the world’s largest IPO will be as earth-shattering as originally thought.
The original estimate offered by Saudi Arabia, which placed Saudi Aramco’s worth at around $2 trillion, was based on a valuation of Saudi Arabia’s oil proven reserves, 261 billion barrels. Multiplying at $8 per barrel, those reserves alone are worth $2.088 trillion. When Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman made that original estimate, it garnered some skepticism: how could any company be worth such an astronomic sum?

This post was published at Wolf Street on Feb 28, 2017.