Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) has staked his country's future on selling a 5% stake in Saudi Aramco, the most valuable asset it has.

And it is his hope that this IPO will help finance the country's turnaround making it less dependent on oil revenue.

It's been trying to do this for three years and was ready to pull the trigger when the Houthi rebels in North Yemen pulled theirs and damaged major Aramco facilities at Ab Qaiq in August.

The IPO itself was off the table until next year but the Saudis have officially put it back on the table, submitting the necessary paperwork to make the sale.

What's held up this IPO has been MbS's insistence on a $2 trillion valuation while playing very coy about the company's actual assets and reserves. It took a couple of rounds of failed book-runner commitments to finally get the Saudis to offer some glimpse at Aramco's finances.

From Irina Slav at Oilprice.com in March 2019:

Aramco has never published financial reports. Although there were assurances that it will start doing so ahead of the IPO, to date the latest entry on Aramco's Corporate Reports page is from July 20 last year, and includes production figures for 2016. Last year, sources had told Reuters the company was planning to start publishing financial reports early this year, but this has not happened yet.

By April, Aramco finally produced financial numbers that were reasonably current and even Bloomberg was skeptical of this $2 trillion valuation. It certainly wasn't true when oil prices were in the gutter below $40 a barrel in 2016.

The Aramco IPO is the lynchpin to MbS's Vision 2030 plan to remake and upgrade the Kingdom's economy away from just being a Gas Station in the Desert that buys U.S. weapons and wages regional wars through proxies.

But now that the paperwork has been filed and the IPO likely to happen we now have a bevy of financial research reports coming out with their assessments of it.

And the numbers are all over the place. Here they are via Zerohedge:

The source said BofA's low valuation of the company is at $1.22 trillion with a high estimate of $2.27 trillion, the gap is enormous and has spooked some investors. 

Goldman Sachs values Aramco between $1.6 trillion and $2.3 trillion. 

"Note that our suggested valuation framework is based on a long-term analysis, and it is not linked to a near-term assessment of the likely performance of the company's shares," Goldman's pre-IPO report said. 

Much of Goldman Sach's valuation of the oil company is derived from an average oil price of $64.50 for 2019, and $60 per barrel from 2020 through 2023.

EFG Hermes has a valuation of $1.55 trillion to $2.1 trillion, several fund managers told Reuters.

Bernstein's research deck valued Aramco around $1.2 trillion to $1.5 trillion.

HSBC, one of the lead underwriters of the IPO, values the oil company between $1.59 trillion to $2.1 trillion.

BNP Paribas, another bank playing a critical role in the IPO, values Aramco around $1.42 trillion. 

"These ranges are always wide as research analysts want to cover both low end and high end, so you want to show the sensitivity of assumptions," one banker told Reuters.

But let's back up here for a second and remember what MbS was originally selling, 20% of the company for $400 billion. Now it's 5% of the company for likely between $65 and $75 billion at a $1.3 to $1.5 trillion valuation.

It's not the company's performance MbS is worried about. It is how much this IPO will bring the government in the form of dividends to pay for its operations.