Narrow set of options ht @ahmed

Sad bankers

Almost 5 million people have applied for shares in Saudi Aramco’s initial public offering with a total value of 47.4 billion riyals as the retail tranche came to an end on November 28, while bids from institutional investors have reached 119 billion riyals so far with few more days to go for them to submit bids until December 4.

This brings the total to 166 billion riyals which means it has been oversubscribed and raised 1.7 times what the government said it wanted, but this is still far less than what we have seen with previous Saudi share sales. The National Commercial Bank IPO in 2016 was covered 23 times over, while 10 million Saudis participated in Emaar IPO in before the stock market crash in 2006.

Only 10.5% of bids came from non-Saudi investors after the company decided not to market the flotation abroad due to lack of appetite from foreign institutional investors over the valuation and other concerns, but Saudi Aramco executives have traveled to Kuwait and UAE as their sovereign wealth funds are expected to invest.Narrow set of options ht @ahmed