12-Figure Income

Emailed on April 5th, 2019 in The Friday Forward

Oil giant Saudi Aramco released its 2018 financials, which is a pretty big deal for a few billion reasons (pun intended) but mostly that for decades the Saudi Arabian government has kept the earnings of Saudi Aramco private.

Software might be "eating the world" but oil paid for the meal. Saudi Aramco reported $111.1B in net income for 2018.

For context, it dwarfed Shell, its closest competitor, by $87.2B, and earned more than J.P. Morgan Chase, Alphabet, Facebook, and ExxonMobil combined -- easily making Saudi Aramco the world’s most profitable company.

Last year, Aramco produced an average of 13.6B barrels per day -- more than 3x that of ExxonMobil.

The company has released its numbers as it prepares for a $15B bond sale, which the company plans to use to finance almost a $70B stake in Saudi Arabia’s petrochemical company.

In 2018, Aramco paid about $160 billion to the government in dividends, taxes and royalties.

---