Saudi Arabia said on Friday that it will sell a second piece of Aramco stock worth billions of dollars. This is the first time since the company went public in 2019 that Saudi Arabia has sold stock in Aramco.
In an online corporate disclosure, Saudi Aramco 2223, -1.81%, which used to be called the Saudi Arabian Oil Co., confirmed the sale of stock.
The price per share was set at between $7.12 and $7.73, and 1.545 billion shares were being sold. That would make the shares worth about $11.9 billion at the high end of the range.
They will first be sold to large investors on Sunday, and then to regular people on Monday.
With a market value of $1.8 trillion, Aramco is the sixth most valuable company in the world, after Alphabet (owner of Google) (-2.15%), Apple (AAPL) (+0.53%), Microsoft (-3.38%), NVIDIA (-3.77%), and Amazon (AMZN) (-1.48%).
Since the company’s 2019 IPO, only 1.73% of it has been traded on the Tadawul, which is Saudi Arabia’s stock exchange. This is a very small amount.
This extra offer is equal to 0.64% of all the shares in the company.
The Saudi government still has the most shares in Aramco. Some of those shares go to the kingdom’s sovereign wealth funds as part of the government’s plan to quickly move the economy away from oil.
Saudi Arabia is one of the cheapest places in the world to make crude oil because it has a lot of oil resources close to the surface of its vast desert.
As of Thursday, Aramco shares were worth about $7.75 each. Since the beginning of the year, Aramco shares have lost almost 12% of their value.
Aramco said it made a profit of $121 billion last year, which was less than the record it set in 2022 because energy prices were lower.
