The value of Aramco, like that of any company in any sector, is a function of its cash flows, growth and risk. In fact, the story that underlies the Aramco valuation is that of a mature company, with large cash flows and concentrated country risk. That said, the structuring of the company and the desire of the Saudi government to use its cash flows to diversify the economy play a role in value.
General Assumptions
While I will offer three different approaches to valuing Aramco, they will all be built on a few common components.
- First, I will do my valuation in US dollars, rather than Saudi Riyals, since as a commodity company, revenues are in dollars and the company reports its financials in US dollars (as well as Riyal). This will also allow me to evade tricky issues related to the Saudi Riyal being pegged to the US dollar though the reverberations from the peg unraveling will be felt in the operating numbers.
- Second, I will use an expected inflation rate of 1.00% in US dollars, representing a rough approximation of the difference between the US treasury bond rate and the US TIPs rate. Third, I will use the equity risk premium of 6.23% for Saudi Arabia, representing about a 0.79% premium over my estimate of a mature market premium of 5.44% at the start of November 2019.
- Finally, rather than use the standard perpetual growth model, where cash flows continue forever, I will use a 50-year growth period, representing the fact that the company's primary asset, its oil reserves, are not infinite and will run out at some point in time, even if additional reserves are discovered. In fact, at the current production level, the existing reserves will be exhausted in about 35 years.
Valuation: Promised Dividends
While the dividend discount model is far too restrictive in its assumptions about payout to be used to value most companies, Aramco may be the exception, especially given the promise in the prospectus to pay out at least $75 billion in dividends every year from 2020 and 2024, and the expectation that these dividends will continue and grow after that. There is one additional factor that makes Aramco a good candidate for the dividend discount model and that is the absolute powerlessness that stockholders will have at the company to change how much it returns to shareholders. To complete my valuation of Aramco using the promised dividends, I will make two additional assumptions:
- Growth rate: I will assume a long term growth rate in dividends set equal the inflation rate, and since this valuation is in US dollars, that inflation rate will be 1%.
- Discount rate: Rather than use a discount rate reflecting the risk of an oil company, I will be one that is closer to that demanded by investors in REITs and oil royalty trusts, investments where the bulk of the returns will be in dividends and those dividends are backed up by asset cash flows.