, TOKYO: Japanese companies are unlikely to invest in Saudi Aramco's blockbuster initial public offering because it is difficult to evaluate the value of the world's biggest oil company, the head of Japan's largest refiner said on Friday.
"It's difficult to think that many Japanese investors will make investments," JXTG Holdings President Tsutomu Sugimori said at an earnings briefing. He was responding to a question on whether Japanese companies would follow Chinese investors, after Bloomberg reported that Chinese state-owned firms, including Sinopec Corp, were considering investing up to US$10 billion in the Aramco share offer."We don't know about Aramco's crude oil reserves and how their contracts with the Saudi royal family work and so on. Aramco will need to disclose this information, but it is not clear how open Aramco will become," Sugimori said.
JXTG and other Japanese refiners have longstanding relationships with Aramco, having been big buyers of Saudi crude for decades, although Japan's oil imports have fallen as a declining population uses more efficient automobiles.