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The 23 companies that create the most profit per employee

Matthew Michaels   

The 23 companies that create the most profit per employee
Careers2 min read

Apple employees

Jack Taylor/Getty

Apple employees bring a lot of profit to the company.

  • Apple is seventh in profit per employee, Facebook is fourth, and Walmart is 99th.
  • Fannie Mae, Gilead, and Freddie Mac earn the most profit for each employee of any company.
  • Banks and pharmaceutical companies are all over the list, but those led by women CEOs are few and far between.

Apple made over $45.5 billion in profits over its last fiscal year, leading Fortune's Global 500 list of profitable companies. With 116,000 employees, the tech giant profits nearly $400,000 per employee.

Using Fortune's list of 500 companies with the highest revenue, Expert Market calculated which 100 companies profit the most for every worker they employ.

BI Graphics_Most profitable companies per employee

Samantha Lee/Business Insider

To find these numbers, Expert Market simply divided the company's profit over the last financial year by the number of people it employs.

Apple did not in first; Tim Cook's company ended up in a respectable seventh on Expert Market's list. Facebook - 28th in profit but with about a tenth of the number of Apple's employees - is fourth.

Walmart - the 13th most profitable company - drops to 99th when ranked by profit per employee because of its large 2.3 million-person workforce.

Walmart

Getty/Joe Raedle

Government-sponsored entities Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are first and third on the list, respectively. Fannie Mae - or more properly, the Federal National Mortgage Association - had a profit of $12.3 billion and a profit per employee of $1.76 million. Its brother organization, Freddie Mac, had a lower total profit and fewer employees but made $1.3 million for each employee.

Gilead Sciences - an American pharmaceutical company - falls in between the mortgage loaners. With $1.5 million in profits per employee, Gilead came in second on Expert Market's ranking. In total, 10 pharmaceutical companies made their way to the top 100.

Banks took up 30 spots on the list of the 1oo companies that were most profitable per employee, led by Goldman Sachs at 10th.

This year's Fortune 500 has a record 32 female CEOs, but by profit per employee, a woman-led company doesn't come in until the 55th spot, where Safra Catz is one of Oracle's two top executives. Catz is joined in the top 100 by Lockheed Martin's Marillyn Hewson, PepsiCo's Indra Nooyi, IBM's Ginni Rometty, and General Motor's Mary Barra.

Eight of the top 10 and 12 of the top 20 companies for profit per employee are American organizations. Of the remaining eight companies, three are Chinese, two are Australian, and there's one company each from Japan, Taiwan, and the UK.

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