Oil giant Saudi Aramco announced on Sunday that its latest share offering has successfully raised $11.2 billion, with a significant portion of the shares being snapped up by international investors.
“The majority of the shares constituting the institutional tranche of the offering was allocated to investors located outside of the Kingdom,” Aramco stated, ahead of the shares beginning trading on the Saudi stock exchange as it reopened on Sunday.
According to sources close to the situation, approximately 58 percent of the shares were allocated to international investors, a notable increase from the 23 percent allocated during the company’s initial public offering (IPO) in 2019, which remains the largest flotation in history. These sources, speaking anonymously, revealed that about 70 percent of the orders from outside the local market came from the European Union and the United States, with additional interest from Japan, Hong Kong, and Australia.
Aramco, the largely state-owned crown jewel of the Saudi economy, announced on May 30 that it would sell 1.545 billion shares, or approximately 0.64 percent of its issued shares, on the Saudi stock exchange. This secondary offering is expected to provide a short-term financial boost to Saudi Arabia as it undertakes large-scale projects such as resorts and stadiums, integral to its ambitious economic reform plan, Vision 2030.
The Vision 2030 initiative includes high-profile projects like NEOM, a futuristic megacity planned in the Saudi desert. This latest share sale is seen as a test of foreign investor interest in the kingdom’s economic transformation more than halfway through the Vision 2030 timeline.
Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest crude oil exporter, saw the government’s stake in Aramco drop to around 81.5 percent following this second share sale. On Friday, Aramco set the offering price at 27.25 Saudi riyals ($7.27) per share, at the lower end of the initially announced range of 26.70 to 29 Saudi riyals. Aramco shares closed at 28.30 Saudi riyals per share on Thursday, giving the company a market capitalization of approximately $1.83 trillion.