The week in energy: #Saudi Aramco draws back the curtain | Financial Times

The week in energy: Saudi Aramco draws back the curtain | Financial Times:

Some people are excited about the possibility that The Winds Of Winter, the long-awaited new instalment in George R R Martin’s series of novels A Song of Ice and Fire, might at last be published in 2019. In the energy world, though, the publishing event of the year has already arrived, in the shape of Saudi Aramco’s bond prospectus. The 469-page document issued on Monday, intended for potential buyers in the company’s first-ever international bond sale, offered an unprecedented insight into the details of its finances and operations.

The prospectus still left plenty of unanswered questions, as David Sheppard and Robert Smith noted in the Financial Times, including the company’s plans for future borrowings and dividend payments to the Saudi government. But even so, the prospectus revealed more to the world about Saudi Aramco than this chronically reticent company had ever disclosed before, including its staggering net income of $111bn last year. A nice set of charts from the FT’s Lex column, showing some comparisons between Saudi Aramco and other large energy companies and oil-producing regions, really only began to scratch the surface of the information that was published.