Saudi Aramco → SABIC
Saudi Aramco paid $69.1bn for 70% of SABIC, buying it from the kingdom's own Public Investment Fund on instalments running to 2028 — a transfer between two arms of the Saudi state that took the oil producer into petrochemicals, a business SABIC has since been shrinking in Europe and the Americas.
A 70% stake bought from the Public Investment Fund, moving Aramco downstream into chemicals.
- Value
- $69B
- Announced
- March 2019
- Completed
- June 2020
- Sector
- Energy
- Deal type
- acquisition
- Acquirer
- Saudi Aramco (Saudi Arabia)
- Target
- SABIC (Saudi Arabia)
Why it mattered
SABIC ranked fourth among chemical companies on the 2019 Fortune Global 500, with $45.1bn of revenue, and had expanded abroad by buying DSM's petrochemicals business in 2002 and General Electric's plastics division for $11.6bn in 2007. Its 70% holder was the Public Investment Fund, the sovereign wealth fund; the remaining 30% traded on the Saudi exchange.
For Aramco the purchase served a downstream strategy: lifting its global refining capacity from 4.9m to 8–10m barrels a day by 2030 and converting 2–3m barrels of that into petrochemicals. The agreement signed on 27 March 2019 priced the fund's stake at SAR 259.125bn, or SAR 123.39 a share — $69.1bn — and Aramco said it had no plans to buy the listed minority.
Closing took fifteen months. In between, Aramco raised $25.6bn in December 2019 in what was then the world's largest IPO, and the pandemic then halved its first-half 2020 net income. When the deal completed on 16 June 2020, the two sides signed an addendum turning the price into a seller loan from the fund: $7bn by August 2020, then yearly instalments to April 2026 with loan charges, the last charge falling due in April 2028. Aramco also agreed to a $3bn advance in April 2022 if certain oil-market conditions occurred in 2021.
What it left behind
Aramco consolidated SABIC and gained the right to elect a majority of its nine-member board. SABIC has since been exiting what it calls structurally underperforming assets. In January 2026 SABIC agreed to sell its European petrochemicals business, with plants at Teesside, Geleen, Gelsenkirchen and Genk, to AEQUITA for an enterprise value of $500m, and its engineering thermoplastics business in the Americas and Europe to Mutares for $450m, with SAR 18.3bn of expected non-cash losses in its fourth-quarter 2025 accounts. SABIC reported a 2025 loss of $6.87bn. The Mutares sale completed in August 2026; the AEQUITA sale was expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2026, and as of September 2026 Aramco still owns 70% of SABIC. When buyer and seller answer to the same shareholder, the price and payment schedule can be negotiated and renegotiated at will; the cycle of the business being transferred cannot, and it lands on the buyer.