For more than a year, Saudi Arabia has claimed that its oil giant Aramco is worth around US$2 trillion, and that its initial public offering will be held in the second half of 2018. As the date gets closer, speculation has intensified that the Saudis are now thinking of delaying the IPO until 2019 as they struggle to achieve the US$2-trillion valuation that the top Saudi officials are seeking for the Kingdom’s oil firm. Apart from the very high target valuation of Aramco—which international analysts have questioned since the beginning—the Saudis face another, possibly greater, hurdle to listing the oil giant as early as this year. It looks like the biggest U.S. hedge and mutual funds—to whom Saudi officials have recently pitched Aramco’s IPO plan in the U.S.—are not very keen on investing in the Saudi oil firm, Bloomberg reports , quoting people familiar with the discussions. At meetings […]