Saudi Arabian oil giant Aramco announced Sunday that its initial public offering raised a record $29.4 billion, a figure higher than previously stated after the company used a “greenshoe option” to sell more shares to meet investor demand.
The company said that the sale of an additional 450 million shares took place during the initial public offering process.
The IPO’s value raised went up from $25.6 billion to $29.4 billion.
The shares sold in the over-allotment option “had been allocated to investors during the book-building process and therefore, no additional shares are being offered into the market today,” Aramco said.
Sunday’s trading figures value Aramco at $1.85 trillion, well ahead of Apple, the second-largest company in the world after Aramco.
The oil and gas company, which is majority owned by the state, began publicly trading on the local Saudi Tadawul exchange on Dec. 11. It hit upward of $10 a share on the second day of trading. This gave Aramco a market capitalization of $2 trillion, making it comfortably the world’s most valuable company.
Aramco’s additional sales mean the company has publicly floated 1.7 percent of its shares. It’s IPO, even before the added sales, was the world’s largest ever.
More so, qualified foreign investors (QFIs) were net purchasers of SAR 999.8 million worth of stocks on the Saudi Stock Exchange (Tadawul) in the week ending Jan. 9, 2020 according to data issued by the Saudi bourse.
Foreign investors offloaded SAR 41.5 million worth of shares through swap agreements.
Saudi corporates were net purchasers of shares worth SAR 13.5 million. On the other hand, Institutional DPMs were net buyers of shares worth SAR 706.3 million last week.
