Google had $209,624 in profit per employee in 2008, which beats all the other large tech companies we looked at, including big hitters like Microsoft, Apple, Intel and IBM.
(As you may know, we have been taking a closer look at what kind of money some of the most well-known tech companies are making. The ones we have been looking at are Adobe, Amazon, Apple, Baidu, Cisco, Dell, eBay, Google, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun and Yahoo.)
Correction to the numbers above: Baidu’s numbers are in Chinese RMB, not USD.
Some companies who have almost the same profit per employee:
- Just over $30k: IBM, Yahoo, Amazon and Dell.
- Around $64k: Oracle and Intel.
- Around $120k: Adobe and Cisco.
A battle against overhead due to size?
One would imagine that the larger a company gets, the more difficult it becomes to minimize overhead and costs. For example, HP and IBM, by far the largest companies listed here in terms of sheer size, have a relatively low profit margin per employee.
In that sense Microsoft is doing a very good job considering that they are close to matching Google in spite of having 4.5 times as many employees. And of course, looking at overall profit for the company, Microsoft is way ahead of every other company on this list.
We’re definitely not financial analysts, but it seems to us that Google is doing a really good job keeping their company profitable even though they have grown so rapidly (Google just turned 10 last year).
Summary table for 2008
For those interested, here is a table with some more data, including the actual number of employees and the revenue per employee. The list is sorted by profit per employee:
| Company | Employees | Revenue per employee | Profit per employee |
|---|---|---|---|
| 20,164 | 1,080,914 | 209,624 | |
| Microsoft | 91,000 | 663,956 | 194,297 |
| Baidu | 6,397 | 499,961 | 163,844 |
| Apple | 32,000 | 1,014,969 | 151,063 |
| Cisco | 66,129 | 597,922 | 121,762 |
| Adobe | 7,335 | 488,056 | 118,856 |
| eBay | 16,200 | 527,238 | 109,844 |
| Intel | 82,500 | 455,588 | 64,145 |
| Oracle | 86,657 | 258,837 | 63,711 |
| Dell | 76,500 | 798,706 | 32,392 |
| Amazon | 20,600 | 930,388 | 31,311 |
| Yahoo | 13,600 | 530,037 | 31,199 |
| IBM | 398,455 | 260,080 | 30,957 |
| HP | 321,000 | 368,735 | 25,947 |
| Sun | 33,556 | 413,637 | 12,010 |
Correction to the numbers above: Baidu’s numbers are in Chinese RMB, not USD.
Further reading: You might want to check out our two previous posts in this little series, the first being about how much money these companies are making, and the second one being about how big they are.
Hat tip to Daniel Howard who asked us for the profit per employee numbers in the first place.
Data source: Google Finance
All the companies we included in this survey are publicly traded on NYSE/NASDAQ. Although Sun was recently bought by Oracle, we included it anyway.
Image credit: Tracy O.
