What 18 Of The Biggest Technology And Media Companies Earn Per Employee

Apple makes nearly half a million dollars for each of its 80,300 employees, by far the most of any company on the list.

Chris Ritter/BuzzFeed

A company's revenue is not unlike a movie's box office gross — it has nothing to do with profitability. While revenue is the figure that usually grabs the headlines, what a company actually earns is what remains after the costs of goods, expenses, and taxes are subtracted. Profitability is, in essence, a measure of how efficiently a company operates.

Using data culled from their most recent 10-K reports, we looked at how efficiently some of the biggest media, entertainment and technologies companies are run as a measure of profitability per employee. To get the figure, we simply divided the fiscal year 2013 net income a company reported in its 10-K (companies end their financial years at different times, some in June, some in September, some in December) by the number of employees it reported.

The results were surprising even to us. We already knew that Apple made a lot of money, but nearly half a million dollars for each of its 80,300 employees is still awe-inspiring. The fact that Rupert Murdoch's 21st Century Fox collects more for each of its employees than Google, Facebook, and Microsoft is a testament to the money-making power of cable networks and the fact that Murdoch runs a very lean organization. Similarly, Comcast and Disney are two of the biggest revenue-generating companies in media, but because their workforces are so large (136,000 for Comcast; 175,000 for Disney) they rank at the bottom of the list.

Here's a breakdown of the results from most money made per employee to least money made per employee:

Apple: $460,772 per employee.

Stephen Lam / Reuters

Apple spent much of 2013 fending off an attack from activist investor Carl Icahn over stock buybacks and questions from investors about its new product pipeline. Still, the company reported net income of $37 billion on revenue of $171 billion at the end of its 2013 fiscal year in September. The company said that as of Sept. 28, 2013 it had 80,300 "full-time equivalent" employees.

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