Have you ever heard of the Saudi oil company Aramco? Yeah, well, this company made $111 billion last year as per a note from Moody’s. The rating agency has based its note on the fact that Saudi Aramco is planning to make use of a massive bond to help finance the purchase of 70% of Saudi Basic Industries Corporation. Aramco is hopeful that it will be able to buy this stake in the state-owned petrochemical company at the cost of $69.1 billion.
This is the first public disclosure of its earnings by Aramco in decades that it has been under the ownership of the Saudi government. In comparison, Apple (AAPL) made $59.4 billion in 2018. Apple is considered to be the world’s most profitable public company, but it made just over half as much as Aramco. ExxonMobil (XOM), the biggest US oil company was able to make only $20.8, and Royal Dutch Shell (RDSA), the biggest publicly traded oil company made $23.4 billion.
Aramco earned a revenue of $355.9 billion and had $48.8 billion in cash on books at the end of 2018. All of this information comes from Moody’s note. That is much more than its debt of $27 billion. It was able to get this much thanks to a 31% increase in the average oil prices in 2018 as compared to 2017.
Aramco had planned to go public last year. In what would have been the biggest initial public offering ever, it would have offered 5% of the company up for sale. The Saudis were hoping to raise about $100 billion in the offering that would value the company at $2 trillion. That is twice the value of Microsoft (MSFT) that is known as the most valuable public company with a market value of $904.8 billion. However, the offering never came to pass.