Revenue per employee in the computer industry

http://www.devdaily.com/business/revenue-per-employee-computer-services-industry

by Maro • 16 years ago

17 14 16 years ago

devdaily.com

Maro• 16 years ago

The fact that Apple and Google generate about $1.2 million in revenue per employee is amazing.

whatwhatwhat• 16 years ago

bluenile.com does better

GBond• 16 years ago

This list of specific to software or software services companies. If you open it up beyond this (still with dev/rev ratio) I'd bet small and algo-trade/hf/hedge fund would rank at the top.

MikeCapone• 16 years ago

I've seen a few specialty Property-Casualty insurance/reinsurance companies that do better, but I don't know much about other industries, so I'm not sure if it's common or not (probably not).

arethuza• 16 years ago

I believe advertising companies can do better than this - I remember a friend telling me where he worked they had 200 employees and a turnover of about $300 million.

TorKlingberg• 16 years ago

I find these numbers are not so useful because they are artificially inflated by outsourcing things like building maintenance. If the people actually producing iPhones were Apple employees, their number would be much lower. Profits per employee would say more, but can quickly turn zero or negative in a bad year.

wccrawford2• 16 years ago

Every company aims to keep costs low, employees count at a minimum, and profits high. I don't see why these companies should be any different.

The companies that 'actually produce' the physical products have their own set of numbers to worry about, too.

jarek2• 16 years ago

The point is that companies like Accenture or Dell Services by their nature can't outsource their money makers. A comparison between Apple and Accenture on this subject, especially using revenue as opposed to profit, is just not valid.

_delirium• 16 years ago

Revenue-per-employee doesn't tell you anything about "aim to keep costs low", though, only about keeping employee count low. You could improve your revenue-per-employee figure by finding $100m of employees, firing them, and then hiring an external firm for $200m to do the same job. All that's really done though is just hidden the employees: they're now employees of another firm, but they're still indirectly costing you $200m. To account for that, you need a measure other than revenue-per-employee, like perhaps revenue-per-dollar-spent.

It really tells you more about corporate structure than anything else. Companies that do a lot of in-house work will do badly on the measure, while companies that prefer to mostly pay others to handle large portions of their work will do well--- regardless of which company manages to get the work done cheaper.

JimboOmega• 16 years ago

Those of us working in the low revenue-per-employee companies really want to work for the high revenue-per-employee companies. It also makes me wonder if the high revenue-per-employee companies are getting the 10x value out of employees that is oft mentioned (and debated).

Of course, revenue is misleading as others (Torklingberg, _delirium) have pointed out, because it doesn't reflect cost.

What I am most interested in is the productivity per employee, which is rather elusive.

awongh• 16 years ago

I wonder how much these figures are skewed by hiring practices at google, et. al, where they tend to outsource a lot of non-tech jobs.... are all those amazon people who pack boxes counted as employees? Maybe some of those figures would be different depending on who you considered an employee.

I'd like to see an analysis of revenue per engineer......

Revenue per employee in the computer industry

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