Saudi Aramco Brand Guidelines: A 1933 Concession, Dammam No. 7 & a 2019 Listing

A 1933 concession and a well called Dammam No. 7.

Saudi Aramco traces its beginnings to 1933, when Saudi Arabia signed an oil concession with the Standard Oil Company of California (SoCal), the company says. English Wikipedia adds that the government preferred SoCal’s bid to a rival one from the Iraq Petroleum Company, and that SoCal assigned the concession to a wholly owned subsidiary, the California Arabian Standard Oil Company, or CASOC. Drilling began in 1935. In 1936 the Texas Company, later Texaco, bought half of the concession, Wikipedia says.

Results were slow. The company’s own history says that in 1937 SoCal executives asked their chief geologist, Max Steineke, for advice, and he told them to keep drilling. In 1938 commercial production began from Dammam No. 7, a well the company calls the “Prosperity Well.” Its timeline lists the first tanker load of exported petroleum in 1939 and the discovery of the Abqaiq field in 1940.

The Second World War reached the Gulf. On 19 October 1940 an Italian air raid aimed at the Bahrain Petroleum Company’s refinery also struck Dhahran, causing minor damage, according to English Wikipedia. On 31 January 1944 the company changed its name from California Arabian Standard Oil Co. to the Arabian American Oil Co., shortened to Aramco, Wikipedia says, and the company’s timeline records Ras Tanura completing its first year of operations in 1947.

Ownership widened after the war. On 17 March 1947, Wikipedia says, Standard Oil of New Jersey, later Exxon, bought 30% and Socony-Vacuum, later Mobil, bought 10%, with SoCal and Texaco keeping 30% each. In 1950, after the company agreed to share profits with the government on a 50/50 basis, its headquarters moved from New York to Dhahran, where they remain.

From Tapline to full state ownership.

The company’s history lists the milestones of the following decades: production of 500,000 barrels a day in 1949; the Trans-Arabian Pipeline, or Tapline, completed in 1950 to carry crude from eastern Saudi Arabia to the Mediterranean; the offshore Safaniya field, found in 1951; and production above a million barrels a day in 1958. English Wikipedia describes Safaniya as the world’s largest offshore oil field and Ghawar, confirmed in 1957, as the largest onshore field.

Control then passed to the state in stages. The Saudi government bought a 25% interest in Aramco in 1973, raised it to 60% in 1974 and concluded its purchase of the company in 1980, the company says. Aramco went on running the assets for the government until 1988; in November that year a royal decree created the Saudi Arabian Oil Company, Saudi Aramco, to take control of the former Aramco assets, according to Wikipedia. The company says Ali I. Al-Naimi became its first Saudi president in 1984 and its first Saudi president and chief executive in 1988.

From 1989 the company moved downstream and abroad. It says a joint venture with Texaco formed that year, Star Enterprises, later became Motiva, of which Saudi Aramco took sole ownership in 2017, including the refinery at Port Arthur, Texas. It bought 35% of South Korea’s SsangYong Oil Refining, renamed S-Oil in 2000, in 1991, and 40% of the Philippine refiner Petron in 1994. In June 2020 it acquired 70% of the chemicals maker SABIC, and in 2023 it completed the purchase of Valvoline Inc.’s global products business, the company says.

Research is a recurring theme in its own account. The company describes POWERS, a reservoir simulator developed in 1997, its successors GigaPOWERS, unveiled in 2010, and TeraPOWERS, and the Research & Development Center opened in Dhahran in 2000.

How national oil companies present themselves.

National oil companies present themselves differently from the listed majors. Most are owned or controlled by a state, and their identities often sit close to the national story: a flag or national colours placed beside a refinery skyline, a company name that includes the country, and a founding date tied to a concession, a nationalisation or a new state. The imagery tends to repeat across the category: offshore platforms photographed at dawn, drilling rigs in desert or jungle, tanker terminals and pipelines running to the horizon.

The brand also reaches the street. Many national oil companies run fuel retail networks at home, and sometimes abroad, so the identity has to work on a petrol-station canopy, a pump, a lubricant bottle and a forecourt sign as well as on a corporate tower. That puts a premium on a simple mark and a small set of strong colours that read from a moving car.

A third strand is people and the public. Engineering academies, scholarships and graduate programmes appear prominently in their communications, alongside sponsorship of national sports teams, marathons, motor racing, museums and cultural centres. These programmes carry the company name into places far from the oilfield, and they often appear in annual reports next to production figures.

Finally, the financial documents matter more than they used to. As several national oil companies have listed shares or floated subsidiaries, their annual reports, sustainability reports and IPO prospectuses have become major brand documents in their own right, with consistent typography, photography and colour. This guide reads each company through those public materials, separating what independent dated sources document from what the company says about itself.

A listing, a cultural centre and global sponsorships.

The listing came in late 2019. Saudi Aramco announced on 3 November 2019 a plan to list 1.5% of the company on the Tadawul exchange and published its prospectus on 9 November, English Wikipedia says. Its shares began trading on 11 December 2019 under the symbol 2222 and rose by 10% on the first day, Turkey’s Anadolu Agency reported that day. Wikipedia describes the company as majority state-owned, and the company’s timeline records 2019 as the year it became a public company, listed on what is now called the Saudi Exchange.

Its public presentation now leans on culture and sport. The company built the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture, known as Ithra, in Dhahran, on the site where commercial oil was first found in 1938; it was designed by the Norwegian architecture firm Snøhetta and inaugurated on 1 December 2016, English Wikipedia says. In March 2020 the company announced a multi-year global partnership with Formula One; from 2022 its name appeared in the title of the Aston Martin team, styled Aston Martin Aramco F1 Team from 2024; and in April 2024 it became a FIFA Major Worldwide Partner with rights covering the 2026 men’s and 2027 women’s World Cups, according to Wikipedia. Its own website uses the shorter name Aramco, alongside the legal name Saudi Arabian Oil Co. in its copyright line.

For a design guide, Saudi Aramco shows how a national oil company carries a name formed in a 1944 American partnership through full state ownership, a stock listing, a cultural centre and global sports sponsorship. Compare Chevron, the company originally known as Standard Oil of California, and ADNOC, another Gulf national oil company. For this guide we use a Gulf blue, a sea green and desert sand with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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