Oil giant Saudi Aramco begins stock sale to raise about $12 billion – NBC New York

• The books opened early Sunday morning offering a price range between 26.70 ($7.12) and 29 Saudi riyals per share. Aramco announced on Thursday its plan to sell 1.545 million shares, a stake of about 0.64%.
• At the midpoint of that range, the sale would total about $11.5 billion. But it could eventually reach up to $13.1 billion.

Saudi state oil giant Aramco began its secondary public offering on Sunday, as the company seeks to raise around $12 billion.

The books opened early Sunday morning offering a price range between 26.70 ($7.12) and 29 Saudi riyals per share. Aramco announced on Thursday its plan to sell 1.545 million shares, a stake of about 0.64%. At the midpoint of that range, the sale would total about $11.5 billion, but could eventually reach as much as $13.1 billion.

Four more banks were added to the share offering, Reuters reported on Sunday, including Credit Suisse Saudi Arabia and BNP Paribas.

The share sale is the company’s second, after Aramco first entered the public markets in 2019 and offered 1.5% of the company to investors. That sale raised a record $29.4 billion, the largest initial public offering in history to date. Aramco is the world’s largest oil company in terms of daily crude oil production and market capitalization.

The latest offer comes at an opportune time for the kingdom, which in early May posted its sixth consecutive quarterly budget deficit amid high spending on multibillion-dollar megaprojects and simultaneously lower oil revenues.

But economists point out that even a financial windfall from another Aramco share sale will barely scratch the surface of the costs of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 diversification plans, which – including giant projects like greenfield cities and all the infrastructure they This implies – they are expected to cost more than a billion dollars.

—CNBC’s Ruxandra Iordache contributed to this report.