Great point. Revenue reflects the value added of the entire supply chain, not just Apple's. EBITDA/employee instead of revenue/employee would be a more appropriate measure. GP's numbers revised:
Twitter EBITDA per employee: $211mn / 8k employees = $26k per employee
Google (Alphabet) EBITDA per employee: $93.7bn / 135k employees = $694k per employee
Apple EBITDA per employee: $130.5bn / 154k employees = $847k per employee
Twitter EBITDA per employee if 3k instead of 8k: $211mn / 3k employees = $70k per employee
If you look at FAANG earnings, their annual gross revenue (before expenses), is at least $1M per employee. Last time I looked Apple does $1.5M including all their Apple store employees.
It's not just insane valuation. If the employees are bringing in $1M per head, you can afford to spend more on those who are making stuff.
> Revenue per employee ratio at Apple is $2.4 million a person or so.
Seems net income per employee is only ~$120,000, though. The way you put it might leave people thinking they have $2.4 million to give to each employee, when in reality they have bills to pay.
"A universe where on average, each employee produced $425,450 in profit in 2010, after deducting their salary and all other expenses. (Or alternatively: $1.2 million in revenue.)"
Wait a minute, you generate that much profit and then you don't get paid even half that much? Sounds like why I left Apple.
Apple: 46710 million / 34300 employees = 1.36180758 million/employee
Dell: 52 900 / 94 300 = 0.56097561
Microsoft: 58690 / 93 000 = 0.631075269
Intuit: 7800 / 3260 = 0.417948718
Intel: 38280 / 79800 = 0.479699248
The stuffy large companies seem to make about 0.5 million /employee /year. The more aggressive ones(Amazon, Apple, FaceBook, Google etc) seem to make about a million/employee. ALmost certainly doesn't hold up statistically. Just something that struck me.
Also, that Business Insider article is an inadvertent IQ test for people who want to regurgitate their figures. That $1.8 million number is revenue/#employees and not profit/#employees. Using profit calculation of $53B/98k is ~$500k. Since, a fully-loaded FTE in Silicon Valley is ~$250k, the ~$500k doesn't look that insane.
If a writer copy&pastes stuff like that into their own essay without critical thought, don't be surprised if it taints the rest of his essay. For example, the "you are not a commodity" is not fully reasoned out. In the essay, it's just an empty platitude/affirmation instead of explaining why some programmers are treated as commodities and how to differentiate themselves to avoid that categorization.
Apple must be pretty proud of its employees, or at least we think it should. According to some new, exciting research from Asymco, it appears that every Apple worker brings in revenue of about $278 per hour. The revenue of Cupertino’s California based Apple was about $320,000 per employee in the first three quarters of the year. Now, compare the numbers, let’s say, with a company like J.C. Penney Co. who brings home only $124,000 per employee per year. Notice the almost triple difference?
The Information, a great Silicon Valley news site, keeps track of FAANG profits and revenues per employee:
"Still, even with the declines, Facebook continues to generate by far the most profits per employee among the Big Five tech companies—$141,552 in the third quarter. In second place was Apple, with $99,898 per employee. Facebook’s core advertising business carries significantly higher margins than Apple’s business, which is based primarily on hardware sales."
That's $140k of average annual profit per each and every one of Facebook's ~40k employees, not just engineers.
However Apple still takes the lead when looking at revenue rather than profit:
"On a different metric, revenue per employee, Apple tops the list at $467,445 in the third quarter, higher even than Facebook’s $410,225 in revenue per employee (see chart above). Apple’s headcount for the quarter was 137,000, including workers in its retail stores."
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=apple+revenue%2Femploye...
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