Aramco world’s most profitable oil firm: report

London : Saudi Aramco is the world’s most profitable oil company, Bloomberg reported yesterday.

Bloomberg news agency cited company accounts as saying Aramco had net income of $33.8 billion in the first six months of 2017 and cash flows of $52.1 billion.

Aramco said: “This is inaccurate, Saudi Aramco does not comment on speculation regarding its financial performance and fiscal regime.”

The accounts, prepared to the IFRS standard, showed the firm made $7.2 billion in net income in the first of half of 2016, when crude averaged $41 a barrel, Bloomberg said.

Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who has made the Aramco IPO a cornerstone of Saudi economic reform to 2030, wants to raise a record $100 billion by selling a 5 percent stake in Aramco on local and foreign
exchanges.

That would give Aramco a market capitalization of $2 trillion, the biggest achieved by any company and dwarfing peers such as Exxon Mobil and Royal Dutch Shell.

By comparison, Shell’s current cost of supplies earnings excluding one-offs - the closest equivalent to net income - stood at $7.4 billion in the first half of 2017, the same as Exxon’s.

Exxon had cash flow from operations and asset sales at $16 billion in the first half of 2017, compared with Shell cash flows of $20.8 billion.

Exxon’s current market capitalization stands at $327 billion and Shell is worth $285 billion.