Aramco posts near-record profit on triple-digit crude as PIF closes record EA buyout

The war is doing the region’s accounting for it this morning. Two of today’s biggest stories come right out of a shut Strait of Hormuz: Aramco is printing near-record profits off triple-digit crude, and Saudi Arabia’s PIF is closing the largest leveraged buyout ever recorded. Triple-digit prices are stuffing Gulf coffers even as the war throttles the physical business of moving the oil — and even as that same capital keeps deploying outward into trophy assets abroad.

Saudi oil giant Aramco’s reported net income jumped 44% y-o-y to USD 32.7 bn in 2Q 2026, its earnings show, as Iran’s Hormuz blockade and Houthi strikes on Red Sea shipping squeezed supply rather than demand — the dynamic Gulf producers have been pricing in since the war reopened this spring. Adjusted for exceptional items, net income rose 33% y-o-y to USD 33.4 bn.

Average realized crude climbed to USD 108.1 / bbl from USD 66.7 a year ago, even as production fell to 9.46 mn boe / d from 12.61 mn in 1Q — the cost of rerouting exports around a closed Strait of Hormuz through Aramco’s 1.2k km East-West pipeline to the Red Sea, which ran flat out at its 7 mn bbl / d ceiling all quarter.

The real signal came on the call: CEO Amin Nasser warned that global oil inventories entered the crisis already near five-year lows, and that the market needs roughly 2.1 mn bpd of fresh demand just to rebuild stocks to comfortable levels — a process he said could take up to 18 months even if the war ended today.

The Public Investment Fund closed its USD 55 bn take-private of Electronic Arts yesterday, marking the biggest leveraged buyout on record. PIF, alongside Silver Lake and Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners, walks away with roughly 93% of the game-maker, up from a c. 10% public stake, with about USD 20 bn of acquisition debt loaded onto EA via JPMorgan.

Egypt’s Valu is taking its first conventional corporate bond to market, an EGP 1 bn private placement built to ride an anticipated central bank easing cycle, per its EGX disclosure (pdf). It's the opening issuance of a broader conventional debt program, the filing says.

The breakdown: Two tranches — EGP 460 mn in 13-month notes at a fixed 20.75%, and a larger EGP 540 mn, 36-month tranche at a variable rate tied to the CBE's average corridor rate plus a 1% margin. The floating tranche is 54% of the deal and would currently yield around 20.5%, against the CBE's 19% deposit and 20% lending rates. That leaves a bit more than half of Valu's new funding positioned to cheapen if the central bank resumes easing — rather than locking it all in at today's rates.

Oman’s Sohar International just gave itself room to grow — and investors wanted in. The lender raised OMR 149.3 mn (c. USD 387.3 mn) through a rights issue that was oversubscribed 1.22x overall, Zawya reports. With 95.5% of eligible shareholders taking up their rights, the leftover 4.5% of shares still drew bids nine times over, meaning the capital came in without meaningfully diluting existing holders.

Jordan’s SME Fund merged two of its own portfolio companies into a single IT platform in its first shot at building a sector champion rather than simply holding stakes. The JOD 125 mn fund, backed by the Central Bank of Jordan since 2018, combined Trismart, its digital-infrastructure and security-systems arm, with ManafSoft, a three-decade veteran of financial software for brokerages and asset managers, according to a press release.

The combined entity spans Jordan, Syria, Palestine, Iraq, and Libya and will sell financial software, digital infrastructure, and security systems as a single package to banks, governments, and businesses — betting bundled beats best-of-breed. The fund calls this an “early step” toward building “sector-focused investment platforms,” grouping portfolio companies into stronger combined businesses rather than holding them separately.

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Dubai-based healthcare company Longevium has closed its first funding round, raising USD 7 mn to build a Longevity AI Research Lab at Dubai Science Park, according to a press release. The release doesn't name the investors. The lab, scheduled to open in 4Q 2026, will function as a dedicated R&D hub rather than a clinic — developing AI-powered tools for biological age assessment, digital twins, early disease detection, and regenerative medicine.

Saudi-based AI startup Rime secured over USD 2 mn in a seed funding round, according to a press release. This round was led by Seedra Ventures, with participation from Athlah Investment, Unity Invest Partners, and several angel investors. The company previously ran a pre-seed round also led by Seedra.

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