Sunday 21 April 2019

Aramco floats downstream in deals flurry | Arab News

Aramco floats downstream in deals flurry | Arab News:

Suddenly, Saudi Aramco is a blurred frenzy of corporate activity. In a little under a month, the KSA oil giant has pulled off some of the biggest deals in the business world this year, and enhanced its reputation beyond crude oil into the fields of finance, petrochemicals and refining. Whatever next?

Since late last month, when Aramco announced it had agreed terms to clinch the purchase of a majority stake in SABIC — the biggest corporate transaction in the Kingdom’s history — it has gone on to break all records for emerging market debt issuance with the $12 billion bond that attracted eight times that amount in interest from global investors.

Then came the $1.25 billion deal to acquire a 17 percent stake in South Korea’s Hyundai Oilbank, followed a couple of days later with news of a possible $15 billion deal to take a stake of up to 25 percent in the refining and petrochemicals business of Reliance Industries of India. Finally — though the deals are coming so fast there is no guarantee of any finality — it was announced that Aramco has signed up to buy from Royal Dutch Shell the 50 percent it does not already own of the SASREF refining joint venture in the Kingdom.

No comments:

Post a Comment