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The Truth About Aramco's $2 Trillion Valuation

• zerohedge.com by Irina Slav

This is how much the company was worth, officials said, if you multiplied its proven reserves by a factor of US$8, which is the figure used to value oil and gas reserves.

There were doubts about that valuation from the start, and now these are deepening as the company crawls closer to the initial public offering.

For starters Aramco's opacity was very likely to make potential investors suspicious.

Aramco has never published financial reports. Although there were assurances that it will start doing so ahead of the IPO, to date the latest entry on Aramco's Corporate Reports page is from July 20 last year, and includes production figures for 2016. Last year, sources had told Reuters the company was planning to start publishing financial reports early this year, but this has not happened yet.

Leaving these concerns aside, there is the bigger problem of the valuation methodology itself. In a blunt but very informative story for Bloomberg Gadfly, Liam Denning suggests that Aramco may need crude oil at US$80 a barrel to get the US$2-trillion valuation it claims it has. That's in addition to making several wild assumptions along the way.


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