In a masterpiece of understatement, Amin Nasser summed up 2020 at a recent awards ceremony. “This year has been challenging,” the president and chief executive of Saudi Aramco told journalists.
Prospects looked very different just over a year ago, when Aramco made its debut on the Tadawul stock exchange in Riyadh in the world’s biggest initial public offering (IPO), becoming the world’s most valuable company in the process.
Having pulled off that complex piece of financial engineering, four years in the making, the life-time Aramco man could have been excused for seeking a period of respite. But it was not to be.
Within a couple of months, global demand for oil had been savaged by the coronavirus pandemic, and Aramco had to think again about the financial assumptions on which the world-beating IPO had been constructed.
“My generation hasn’t seen anything like this. I don't think the world has seen anything like this,” Nasser said, this time eschewing the restraint about what, by general industry consensus, has been the most difficult period in the 150-year history of the oil industry.
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