The 20 Companies With the Most Profit Per Employee
Profit per worker on the Fortune Global 500
The Chart of the Week is a weekly Visual Capitalist feature on Fridays.
Earlier in the week, we showed you the companies that make the most profit per second.
It’s a measure where Apple blows every other company out of the water. The tech giant makes $1,444 in net income per second – about $700 higher than its closest competition, which include banks, conglomerates, and other tech companies.
While Apple may dominate when seconds are used as the denominator, how does it do when looking at profit per employee instead?
Profit Per Employee
Expert Market crunched the numbers on the 100 most profitable companies on the Fortune Global 500 list.
By comparing profits to employees, they came up with a list of the 20 most profitable companies on a per person basis.
| Ranking | Company | Country | Profit per Employee |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Fannie Mae | US | $1,759,000 |
| 2 | Gilead Sciences | US | $1,500,111 |
| 3 | Freddie Mac | US | $1,306,419 |
| 4 | US | $599,307 | |
| 5 | National Grid | UK | $458,639 |
| 6 | Amgen | US | $402,187 |
| 7 | Apple | US | $393,853 |
| 8 | Alphabet | US | $270,329 |
| 9 | Taiwan Semiconductor | Taiwan | $218,951 |
| 10 | Goldman Sachs | US | $215,058 |
| 11 | AbbVie | US | $198,433 |
| 12 | SoftBank Group | Japan | $192,442 |
| 13 | Qualcomm | US | $187,049 |
| 14 | Tencent Holdings | China | $159,533 |
| 15 | Westpac Banking | Australia | $155,244 |
| 16 | SPD Bank | China | $151,287 |
| 17 | Commonwealth Bank | Australia | $148,749 |
| 18 | Microsoft | US | $147,351 |
| 19 | Cisco Systems | US | $145,712 |
| 20 | Industrial Bank | China | $144,141 |
While Apple makes a solid $393,853 in profit for each employee, the company only ranks #7 on the list.
It gets outperformed by one tech company (Facebook, at $599,307 per employee), as well as a combination of companies from the financial, utilities, and biotech sectors.
State Sponsored Profits
On the list, perhaps the most surprising entries are Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. These two U.S. government-sponsored enterprises, which both buy and repackage bank mortgages for the secondary market, were a part of the largest federal bailout in history ($187 billion) during the financial crisis in 2008.
At the time, they were highly criticized for creating an environment of “moral hazard”. As Investopedia puts it:
Quasi-government agencies such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac offered implicit support to lenders underwriting real estate loans.
-Investopedia
Despite this one-time catastrophe, the two organizations are very profitable today – so profitable, in fact, that they rank #1 and #3 on the above list.
Last year, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac brought in $12.3 billion and $7.8 billion in profit respectively. And on a per capita basis, that equates to $1.76 million and $1.5 million per employee.
