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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

Straight from the most trusted source of news & opinion in the investment world – oilprice.com.

Aramco's dividend basically entirely goes to the Saudi government, which owns 98.5% of the company. It is still comfortably the largest oil company in the world, and is investing hundreds of billions in operations over the next few years. Here's a much more objective status report on the company – https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-07/saudi-ara....

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Somehow the writing style was bothering me and I couldn't quite put my finger on it. It was reading like a long-form Reddit rant more so than an actual article.

Bloomberg one seems more based in facts on the ground.

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That being said: the opinionated writing style of "oilprice.com" is still helpful at possibly explaining why these assets are being sold. But facts matter and should come first: the news event (Armaco deciding to sell more assets) should be presented objectively at some point before introducing an opinion about it.

> This took the total capital spending down from around US$40 billion to around US$25 billion. Further reports stated that even this US$25 billion figure was reduced by another US$5 billion, taking the total capital spending in the year from US$25 billion to US$20 billion. However, every second of every day of every month of every year - whatever Aramco does, whatever it sells, whatever it cancels, whatever it cuts back, however many people it sacks – the meter keeps on running, adding US$205 million every day

Notice the convenient change of units between billions and millions there which makes this seem much worse than it actually is. I also didn't realize Oilprice's bias, but seeing that change of units certainly warned me.

The dividend "millions" are per day. The capital spending "billions" are per year. We'd already repeatedly been told that the dividends were 75 billion per year.

What would you have preferred, US$0.205 billion every day?

Well it goes from billion/year to million/day, which is actually closer to billion/year than billion/day. It's also a more natural way of writing it than $0.205 billion. I doubt they indented people to miss the change in units and assume aramco was losing $205 billion per day.

Yeah, and they were implying Saudi Aramco was in trouble because they only place they could place debt was in the Islamic Finance market. (I felt this implied they get terrible price for their debt there, or there's very limited liquidity) but then a couple sentences later, it's say their debt offerings were over-subscribed by a factor of 10. So why is that so bad?

Good catch too on your point that Saudi themselves are receiving the bulk of the dividends....

I did look at aramco share price the other day and it's been very flat after recovering from last march. Strange considering in the meantime oil has double/tripled in price and equity markets have roofed.

What is the separation between the Saudi government and MbS. Is it essentially the same and is it the case of MbS monetizing Aramco at the expense of the investors?

> What is the separation between the Saudi government and MbS

Nothing. The KSA is an absolute monarchy. L’etat, c’est il.

So it really is just a way for them to suck out the cash flow of Aramco and leave nothing but a husk for external investors?

Yes. Absent further evidence, this article is crap. It fails to incorporate the family-state-corporate nexus unique to Aramco.

Doesn't the portion of the dividend paid to themselves represent the amount they intend to spend on public services? I'm not sure it's correct to regard it as meaningless.

Sure, they could reduce government spending, or they could reduce the dividend, and reduce spending more, but in any case, the size of the dividend relative to cash flow or profits still says something about sustainability of the present course.

The KSA, after all, can't issue debt in its own currency, can it?

I think the point is simply if the dividend is paid to themselves then short of corruption or mismanagement they can always pump back that money into the company when needed.

Say you have a household budget, and you have separate "accounts" for different purposes.

If you pay money "to yourself" for groceries, sure, you can always take it back, but you still have to feed your family.

Writing down that your budget for groceries is $0 (or less than whatever is needed) doesn't give you additional freedom.

I’m on shaky ground correcting French, but I think that should be “c’est lui.” Moi, toi, lui,…

You are correct. To expand a bit:

French pronouns have four possible cases: as the subject, direct object, or indirect object of a verb, or not an argument of a verb at all. The declensions are:

je/me/me/moi

nous (colloquial: “on”)/nous/nous/nous

tu/te/te/toi

vous/vous/vous/vous

il/le/lui/lui

elle/la/lui/elle

ils/les/leur/eux

elles/les/leur/elles

In this example, the pronoun is not the argument of a verb, so the fourth case is used (moi, lui, etc.)

This is the key comment. The article hardly stresses this point. The company is a vital contributor to Saudi finances.

And Bloomberg is heavily biased towards the financial industry…anything that will lead to fat fees for the banks is good. Like an huge IPO.

Always best to have both sides presented…thanks for the link.

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