Forget Apple Or Amazon: This Saudi Company Is Wealthiest In World At $1.7 Trillion Market Cap

So which company do you think makes the most profit in the world? It's gotta be something like Apple or Google selling overpriced products right? Wrong.

It's actually by far Saudi Aramco, the state-owned oil company that made Saudi Arabia and its princes rich. Now, they're going public.

Images courtesy: Reuters

To give you an idea how much successful it is, in 2018 Aramco $111 billion dollars in profit. Apple was the closest competitor, but they only made a comparatively paltry $60 billion. So for Saudi Aramco to now be considering an IPO (initial public offering), that's huge news.

The announcement they were going public was made on November 3, the first time the company has gone public in the 86 years of its existence. But just this week it announced a valuation that will dictate its success on the stock market.

And they'll be valued at $1.7 trillion.

Saudi Aramco CEO Amin H Nasser

This is just slightly less than the $2 trillion Saudi's crown prince was seeking, but it's still by far the world's biggest ever IPO, valued at $25.6 billion. The company it's beating is ecommerce giant Alibaba's IPO valuation of $25 billion on the New York Stock Exchange when it debuted.

Aramco is also limiting its IPO to Saudi nationals and foreign institutions that have permission to invest in the country's stock market. It plans to sell about 1.5 percent of the company on the stock market. This translates to about 3 billion shares at about 30 to 32 Riyals a share. That's between approximately Rs 574.5 to Rs 613 a share.

Even so, being an oil company, Aramco business touches a multitude of other business and countries. It has the world's second-largest crude oil reserves, as well as the second-largest daily oil production. It owns the largest refinery in the US, as well as others in China, Japan, Korea, and India.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman came up with the idea to list Aramco's IPO four years ago, as a way to earn billions of dollars to invest in other industries on Saudi Arabia, in the hopes of diversifying the country's export interests and generating employment. However, many say the timing of the IPO couldn't be worse.

For one thing, there's a fear among some circles that the world has or soon will reach peak oil demand, and we'll hit a shortage. And that's just a fear. The other definitive reason many eye this move with uncertainty is the PR storm Saudi Arabia kicked up by murdering journalist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi.

There will likely be plenty of people willing to turn a blind eye, as the US government has done in the wake of the revelation. However, there will be many investors and financiers unwilling to partake of Aramco shares, knowing that the money goes to funding a government with a laundry list of human rights violations to its name.