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"Sometimes just to wrap my head around really large numbers like this..." Personally I like to divide profits and revenues by the number of employees. They hav
by mrb 12y ago
"Sometimes just to wrap my head around really large numbers like this..."
Personally I like to divide profits and revenues by the number of employees. They have 98 000 employees so they generated revenues of $761 000 and net profits of $184 000 per employee in Q4 2014.
Think about this: if you work for Apple, on average you helped the company generate $0.76 million dollars in sales in the last 3 months.
Edit: @smackfu: I do not think it is weird to consider these metrics. They show what Apple, as a business entity taking its own decisions, manage to extract from their suppliers (expenses) and customers (revenues).
- smackfu 12y agoIt's a weird metric, because 1 guy at Apple can hire a firm of 100,000 employees at FoxConn in China to do the actual work for Apple. If those employees instead worked for Apple directly, the end result would be the same but the amount per employee would be far less.
- davidiach 12y agoAnd FoxConn can of course hire millions of other people to do the actual work for them (mine the materials needed for the products, prepare them, ship them and so on).
- sosborn 12y agoIf you include FoxConn employees do you also include FoxConn revenue from Apple?
- gutnor 12y agoIsn't that similar to the way the productivity (the economic metric) is measured though ?
- TTPrograms 12y agoThat's surprisingly reasonable. The rule of thumb I've heard is only half of employee expenses is salary, so that gives you an average "effective" salary of $90,000 for Apple employees.
- amatix 12y agoThe $184K is net profit, so each employee's salary is already counted. Another way of thinking about it: every Apple employee can get a $180K salary increase and they'd still make money.
- hollerith 12y agoA salary increase of $180K quarterly (== $720K annually)!
- sillysaurus3 12y agoWow... Is that correct?
- gilgoomesh 12y agoThe numbers are correct. A better interpretation would be: if the employees owned the company, they'd (effectively) get that much more per year. Instead, shareholders own the company so that money is (effectively) given in equity to the shareholders each year.
- jsprogrammer 12y agoApple shareholders are an enormous cost-center. Perhaps the largest.
- uknj 12y agoWhy are shareholders considered a cost? Apple does not have to pay out dividends.
- jsprogrammer 12y agoAnd yet, it does. I wonder why? At the least, the shareholders hold the cash hostage. They are among the first to be paid out in event of a liquidation. Perhaps a better question is, how are shareholders not a cost?
- jonknee 12y agoMore than half of those employees are retail workers, the profit per knowledge worker must be immense.
- dba7dba 12y agoI disagree. Foxconn employees are employees of Foxconn in name only. They are effectively employees of Apple. No Apple hardware would be produced at the price point, in the quantity needed if Foxconn did not exist. So imo, the revenue per employee of Apple as we are talking about is skewed badly.
- hueving 12y agoI disagree because at some point in the supply chain you have to draw the line. What about the company that made the processors? What about the memory? what about the one that mined the materials?
- dba7dba 12y agoHow about picking a car company for example? Don't most car companies directly hire employees that assemble the final product (car)?
- Cthulhu_ 12y agoYeah, but you can't stuff a hundred thousand cars in a single shipping container.
- dba7dba 12y agoHundreds of thousands of cars are shipped between continents every year...
- dognotdog 12y agoBut, most parts that go into a car are manufactured by suppliers, not the car company. Also, many employees are not direct hires, but employed by an intermediary agency. Long story short, while they do the final assembly more directly, 90% of the work is still done in China, figuratively speaking.
- pherocity_ 12y agoI work for a government, I just contribute to waste. Now I'm even more depressed.
- joeblau 12y agoRun these numbers on Yahoo :)