So the financial news is aflutter with Aramco releasing their financials in order to raise a 10B USD bond offering.

Here's the offering:

https://www.rns-pdf.londonstockexchange.com/rns/6727U_1-2019-4-1.pdf

Here's the relevant table:

So they made 356 billion in revenue and had 111 billion in profits.

Here's the problem I have with this whole thing. If you are making 111 billion in profit, after taxes, after r&d, after everything, then what do you need 10 billion for?

You might be thinking that profit is not the same as cash flow, and you'd be right. But according to them:

They have 85 billion of free cash flow.

So why would you need to raise a bond for 1 month's worth of cash flow?

The Long Con

I think what we have here is a long con. Aramco aborted an IPO several months ago over questions about their financials. So now the plan is to publish clean financials for a few years and then IPO under those new numbers.

Once the IPO is out there and equity buyers have piled in (for a minority share that can't affect actual decisions or operations), all that money will be trapped in the kingdom to fund their gigantic welfare state and neighboring wars.