Largest IPOs in History

Search Fintrev

Search our guides, reviews and glossary.

Saudi Aramco holds the record for the largest IPO ever. The Saudi state oil company raised $25.6 billion when it listed on the Saudi Exchange (Tadawul) in December 2019. After underwriters exercised an overallotment option, the total grew to roughly $29.4 billion. Before Aramco, the record belonged to Alibaba, whose 2014 New York listing raised $21.8 billion in its base deal and about $25 billion once extra shares were sold.

Below the top spot, the ranking depends on a technical choice: whether you count only the shares sold at pricing or include the additional shares underwriters sell days or weeks later. That choice moves at least one entry from the bottom of the top 10 to near the top.

What the order is based on

An IPO’s size is the money raised from selling shares to the public: the number of shares offered multiplied by the offer price. A company that sells 1 billion shares at $20 raises $20 billion before fees. In this hypothetical example, the company could equally reach $20 billion by selling 2 billion shares at $10. Size reflects both how much of the company is sold and the price investors agree to pay.

That makes IPO size different from company size. A huge company can hold a modest IPO by selling a small stake, and a smaller company can rank high by selling a large one. Aramco shows the gap: the offering valued the company at about $1.7 trillion at the offer price, yet only a small fraction of its shares reached the market.

Four measurement issues decide where an entry lands.

Base deal versus overallotment. Most large IPOs include an overallotment option, often called a greenshoe. It lets underwriters sell additional shares, typically up to 15% of the base deal, if demand is strong. Rankings that use the base figure capture the deal as priced. Rankings that include the option capture everything the offering eventually raised.

Primary versus secondary shares. In a primary offering, new shares are created and the cash goes to the company. In a secondary offering, existing holders sell shares and keep the proceeds. Several entries in the top 10 were governments or parent companies selling stakes. The IPO still counts at full size, even though the listed company may not have received most of the money.

Currency conversion. Aramco priced in Saudi riyals, SoftBank Corp. and NTT DoCoMo in yen, and Enel in Italian lire. Their dollar figures depend on the exchange rate used, so entries a few hundred million dollars apart can trade places from one compiler to another.

Share classes. General Motors sold billions of dollars of preferred shares alongside its common stock in 2010. Including or excluding that preferred tranche changes GM’s total and its position against nearby entries.

Entries in the middle of the list sit close together: roughly $14 billion to $18 billion separates the fourth through tenth spots. In that band, small differences in conversion or share-class treatment can reorder neighbors, and rounding or deal components shift some figures: Visa’s IPO appears as $17.3 billion in some compilations and $17.4 billion in others. Totals including the overallotment are known for only three entries, so no complete ranking on that basis is possible. Compare neighbors by their stated figure rather than reading rank as a precise gap.

How the order changes when overallotments count

The overallotment matters most for three entries where both the base and total figures are known.

On base proceeds, ICBC sits at the bottom of the top 10. Once its January 2007 overallotment is included, its total of about $21.9 billion would place it above SoftBank Corp.’s roughly $21.3 billion and the other base-deal figures below it. At the time, that total made it the world’s third-largest IPO.

Alibaba’s underwriters exercised their option four days after the listing. The larger figure is why Alibaba is often described as a $25 billion IPO even when rankings list $21.8 billion.

What the biggest IPOs have in common

The entries fall into three broad groups, and the group a company belongs to explains much of how its deal was structured.

National champions and privatizations

Aramco, NTT DoCoMo, Enel and ICBC were all state-linked companies selling shares to the public.

Saudi Aramco discussed listing on international exchanges before settling on a domestic listing on Tadawul. That decision gave Saudi investors a large role in the offering. The company sold 3 billion shares, and the deal surpassed Alibaba’s 2014 record.

NTT DoCoMo, formally NTT Mobile Communication Network, raised about $18.1 billion in October 1998. It controlled roughly 57% of Japan’s mobile phone market and debuted with the third-largest market capitalization in Japan. The offering came as cellular adoption was accelerating worldwide, and it remains one of the largest telecom IPOs on record.

Enel, Italy’s largest electric utility, raised about $16.4 billion in November 1999. It had hoped to raise closer to $19 billion, so it is the clearest case in the top 10 of a record-sized deal that fell short of its target. The sale was part of a 1990s wave of European privatizations in which governments cut their stakes in major industries.

ICBC, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, went public in October 2006 with a simultaneous listing on the Shanghai and Hong Kong stock exchanges. The dual-listing structure set it apart from the other entries and brought one of China’s largest state-owned banks to both domestic and international investors.

Crisis-era deals

Three entries came out of the 2008 to 2010 financial crisis, and the crisis shaped each one differently.

Visa raised about $17.3 billion in March 2008, in the middle of the crisis. It was the largest U.S. IPO up to that point. Visa does not lend to consumers; it earns fees by processing electronic payments. That separated it from banks absorbing loan defaults, and demand held up despite the market turmoil.

AIA Group raised about $17.8 billion in Hong Kong in October 2010. The listing was central to the restructuring of its former parent AIG after the crisis. It established AIA as the largest independent publicly listed pan-Asian life insurance group, and it remains one of the largest insurance IPOs ever.

General Motors raised about $15.8 billion in common stock in November 2010, just over a year after leaving a government-backed bankruptcy. It was a re-IPO rather than a first listing, since GM had traded publicly before the bankruptcy. The deal was widely seen as a marker of the company’s recovery.

Technology and telecom

Alibaba chose the New York Stock Exchange over Hong Kong, and more than a decade later its listing remains the largest U.S.-listed IPO. It is also the largest technology IPO on record.

SoftBank Corp., the Japanese wireless and broadband subsidiary of SoftBank Group, raised about $21.3 billion on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in December 2018. That made it the largest global offering since Alibaba.

Meta, then Facebook, raised about $16 billion on Nasdaq in May 2012 in one of the most anticipated technology debuts ever. The opening was disrupted by technical failures at Nasdaq, which the SEC later charged over its handling of the IPO, and by concerns over how information was shared with investors.

Size versus investor results

The ranking measures fundraising, not investor outcomes, and the top 10 shows how far apart those can be.

• SoftBank Corp. shares fell about 14.5% on their first day, despite the offering’s size and its link to a major global technology investor.
• Meta shares declined sharply in the months after the listing, and many observers called the debut a disappointment. The company later became one of the world’s most valuable technology firms.
• General Motors stock has gone through volatile periods since 2010.

A large IPO shows that the seller found buyers for a lot of stock at the chosen price, not that the price was low enough to leave room for gains. A government or parent company selling a stake has a reason to seek the highest price the market will bear, which works against new buyers.

Largest IPOs by category

Largest U.S.-listed IPO: Alibaba, at $21.8 billion in its base deal. Visa ($17.3 billion), Meta ($16 billion) and General Motors ($15.8 billion) are the other U.S. listings in the top 10.

Largest technology IPO: Alibaba again, followed by Meta among pure technology listings. SoftBank Corp. and NTT DoCoMo rank higher than Meta but are usually classed as communication services.

Largest IPO outside the U.S.: Saudi Aramco, which is also the largest overall. Most of the top 10 listed outside the United States, in Riyadh, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Milan.

Highest valuation at IPO: Saudi Aramco, at about $1.7 trillion at the offer price. Valuation and capital raised are separate rankings. They happen to share the same leader here because Aramco was large on both measures.

Largest financial services IPO: AIA Group on base proceeds, with ICBC ahead once its overallotment is counted.

Could an AI company break the record?

The record is open, but nothing guarantees a challenger. OpenAI, Anthropic, Databricks and Scale AI have reached multibillion-dollar valuations while staying private, which has led to speculation about future listings.

A high private valuation does not translate directly into a record IPO. To pass Aramco’s $25.6 billion base figure, a company would have to sell a large enough stake at a high enough price, and buyers would have to absorb that much stock in a single offering. A company valued at $300 billion would need to sell more than 8% of itself to raise $25.6 billion. That figure is a hypothetical calculation for illustration, not a forecast for any company. The outcome would also depend on market conditions, demand and how many shares existing owners chose to sell.

The Bottom Line

Aramco leads whichever way proceeds are counted, so the useful comparisons sit below it. If you count everything an offering eventually raised, ICBC moves from tenth to near the top. If you compare the closely grouped middle entries, check the currency conversion and share-class treatment behind each figure before reading much into their order. For investor results, look at how each stock traded after listing, since deal size says nothing about returns.

FAQs