Whether the goal is to organize the world’s information or to build an algorithm that makes millions of lives easier, pretty much every tech company in existence aims to leverage software in some way to do the types of jobs that would otherwise be impossible or uneconomical for humans to do.
Tapping into the properties of the digital world allows these companies to do more with less. They can have global reach with minimal infrastructure, massive scale with little overhead, and impressive revenues without any physical inventory.
Tech companies can even “provide” a service by simply connecting people through a platform, rather than knowing how to perform the service itself.
“Our Greatest Asset”
With this kind of scale, every action taken by an employee packs an extra punch to have an effect on company performance. It’s why companies like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft are willing to pay an arm and a leg for the smartest engineers. These teams are not physically turning out widgets in a factory under the constraints of normal economic factors – instead, they are applying their brains to a codebase, and even the tiniest cost savings can add up when multiplied by millions of users.
Today’s visualization from cost information site HowMuch.net helps put this all in perspective by showing revenue per employee of some of the world’s largest tech companies that are a part of the S&P 500.
Here’s the data in table form:
| Rank | Company | Revenue per employee |
| #1 | Apple | $1,859,000 |
| #2 | $1,621,000 | |
| #3 | Alphabet | $1,253,000 |
| #4 | VeriSign | $1,154,000 |
| #5 | Visa | $1,062,000 |
| #6 | Mastercard | $906,000 |
| #7 | Broadcom | $843,000 |
| #8 | Lam Research | $785,000 |
| #9 | Qualcomm | $772,000 |
| #10 | Microsoft | $748,000 |
| #11 | Applied Materials | $694,000 |
| #12 | Activision Blizzard | $688,000 |
| #13 | Cisco | $684,000 |
| #14 | Xilinx | $640,000 |
| #15 | Yahoo! | $608,000 |
| #16 | PayPal | $599,000 |
| #17 | Intuit | $594,000 |
| #18 | Intel | $560,000 |
| #19 | KLA-Tencor | $535,000 |
| #20 | AMD | $521,000 |
List only based on S&P 500 companies listed in “Technology” category
Facebook, Alphabet, and Visa each bring in over $1 million in revenue per employee – and Apple rakes in nearly $2 million per person.
While these numbers are impressive, not all tech companies on the S&P 500 are masters of scale. In fact, the average tech company brings in closer to $480,000 of revenue per employee.
This amount is comparable to other sectors that make up the S&P 500, like Materials ($600,000 per employee) or Consumer Discretionary ($420,000 per employee).
Article by Jeff Desjardins, Visual Capitalist
