Updates
November 10, 2019: across the board, the Saudi Aramco IPO is being panned --
- twitter: no one finds anything good about it
- "the Aramco IPO isn't a great deal for investors" -- well, duh -- Barron's
- "Saudi Aramco's IPO prospectus doesn't reveal how much it plans to sell" -- WSJ
- key details on which investors are focused were missing -- WSJ
- 675-page prospectus -- 675 pages of obfuscation
Original Post
How many years did we hear about a Saudi Aramco IPO? Five years? Six years? I honestly don't recall but it has been many years.
And "how much" of Saudi Aramco was going to be made available to the public? 2%. Two percent.
Last week the Saudi Aramco IPO was finally launched. It was noted that the prospectus was coming out AFTER the IPO launched. Folks were buying into a "publicly traded company" without knowing what was being sold. A page from the Obamacare page book. "We need to pass the bill to find out what's in it"-- Nancy Pelosi.
The prospectus is yet to be released but the most important "data point" has been leaked.
"How much" of the company is being offered to investors?
Hold on to your keffiyeh.
Reuters is reporting that Saudi Aramco is looking to sell up to 0.5% of the state oil giant to retail investors in its planned initial public offering (IPO).
"Up to." Which means it may not even be 0.5%.
The news was released on Saturday morning, 8:48 a.m. (EST, I assume).
So, at the end of the week, investors assumed they were investing in as much as 2% of Saudi Aramco. Today we learn that they were investing in no more than 0.5% of the company.
Let's see. 0.5 is what percent of 2.0? Twenty-five percent?