Saudi Aramco to Lead Elite $1 Trillion-Plus Club After IPO

(Bloomberg) -- It seems like only yesterday equity investors had pegged $1 trillion as the dividing line between run-of-the-mill large cap companies and freakishly huge ones. Saudi Aramco just took things to a whole new level.

The oil producer's initial public offering Thursday valued the company at $1.7 trillion. That may have trailed Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's hoped-for $2 trillion valuation, but it gives the Saudi Arabian behemoth about a $600 billion lead on Apple Inc. and Microsoft Inc., the only two other companies in the world worth more than $1 trillion.

The race to $1 trillion had become something of a spectator sport in recent years as technology megacaps led the record-long bull market in U.S. stocks. Amazon.com Inc. and Google parent Alphabet Inc. have also been in the running, although neither passed the milestone.

Saudi Aramco's debut would mark the first time in a decade that the world's largest publicly traded company is outside the U.S. In 2009, Exxon Mobil Corp. lost the title to PetroChina Co.

--With assistance from Lu Wang.

To contact the reporter on this story: Richard Richtmyer in New York at rrichtmyer@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Courtney Dentch at cdentch1@bloomberg.net, Lu Wang, Brendan Walsh

©2019 Bloomberg L.P.