Aramco IPO to go ahead by early 2021

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said the flotation of Saudi Aramco would proceed by 2021, Bloomberg reported on Friday.

He made the disclosure in a wide-ranging interview with the newswire conducted at the royal palace in Riyadh on Wednesday.

It also touched on his relationship with Donald Trump, plans to invest a further $45 billion in Softbank, the rising oil price, and production of crude along the Saudi border with Kuwait.

His comments bring clarity to what could be the most talked about initial public offering in corporate history and one that is a key plank of the Vision 2030 economic and social reform agenda.

“I believe late 2020, early 2021,” he said, referring to the timing of the IPO. “The investor will decide the price on the day. I believe it will be above $2 trillion. Because it will be huge.”

Saudi Arabia has been planning to float up to 5 percent of Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest national oil company, on the stock market.

In recent months there had been intense media speculation over whether the planned IPO had been delayed, canceled or replaced with a rival deal involving Aramco purchasing Saudi Basic Industries Corporation, the petrochemical giant better known as SABIC.

The Saudi crown prince told Bloomberg that the Saudi government would retain the shares of Aramco after the IPO, instead of transferring them into the sovereign wealth fund as originally planned.

Instead, the Public Investment Fund (PIF) would receive the $70 billion from the sale of its stake in SABIC, plus the $100 billion that country hopes to raise from the Aramco IPO, Bloomberg reported.