Saudi Aramco briefly reached a $2 trillion market capitalization on the second day of its 2019 initial public offering.
Saudi Aramco, formally Saudi Arabian Oil Company, is Saudi Arabia’s state-controlled oil and natural-gas producer. Its shares began trading on the Saudi Tadawul stock exchange in December 2019 after the company sold a 1.5% stake to investors.
The share price rose on the second trading day, taking the company’s implied market value to about $2 trillion. That made the IPO one of the largest public offerings in history and temporarily placed Aramco among the world’s most valuable listed companies.
The figure was an implied valuation based on the listed share price and the total number of shares, not a sale of the whole company. A related point often missed is that Aramco remained majority owned by the Saudi government after the IPO.