In the past, the company has been valued at up to $10 trillion (£7tn), but based on its reserves of around 260bn barrels, and assuming a very low valuation of $10 profit per barrel, Bloomberg assigned the group a valuation of $2.5 trillion in January.
As the chart below shows, that value could be slightly less now, but that's more than enough to swallow all the listed oil companies which averaged at least 1m barrels of production a day in 2015.
In an interview with Bloomberg last week, Saudi Arabia's deputy crown prince Mohammed bin Salman - who has been charged with the monumental task of slowly weaning the country's economy off oil - said the IPO would give the country liquidity to begin a programme of massive investments at home and abroad. That's because Aramco is being rolled into the Public Investment Fund (PIF), a $2 trillion de facto war chest to diversify government sources of income.
Given prince Mohammed wants to step away from oil, it would be odd if the PIF did swallow up any of the companies listed in the chart. Nonetheless, the listing will have some very interesting implications for those companies and how they are viewed in light of Aramco's prospectus. Most importantly perhaps, the establishment of the PIF will usher in a major buyer in global capital markets.
