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Which Companies Make The Most Revenue Per Employee?

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Which Companies Make The Most Revenue Per Employee?

Which Companies Make The Most Revenue Per Employee?

On average, companies in the energy sector make at least 2x per employee than others

The Chart of the Week is a weekly Visual Capitalist feature on Fridays.

The world’s largest companies have many similarities, but the size of their respective org charts is not necessarily one of them.

At the one extreme, companies such as Walmart require a massive workforce in the millions to run retail operations around the globe. But at the other extreme, an energy giant like Valero is able to generate $76 billion of annual revenue with just 0.4% of the employees of Walmart.

It raises the question: which types of companies make the most revenue per employee, and why?

Revenue Per Head

Today’s chart uses data on companies in the S&P 500 Index courtesy of analytics platform Craft.co.

Instead of plotting the information for all 500 companies, we focused on two groups of firms: (1) energy companies, which tended to skew towards the upper end of revenue per employee ratio, and (2) brands that you will be familiar with, like Netflix, Walmart, Goldman Sachs, Ford, or IBM.

The end result is an astonishing range, with companies making anywhere between <$100,000 per employee (Accenture, McDonald's, Starbucks, Marriott) all the way to >$7 million per employee (Valero Energy).

Industry Averages

Here’s a look at this same data expressed as averages at an industry level, based on the sub-sectors that make up the S&P 500:

RankSectorAvg. Revenue Per Employee
#1Energy$1.79 million
#2Healthcare$0.89 million
#3Utilities$0.81 million
#4Consumer Staples$0.70 million
#5Financials$0.65 million
#6Telecommunications$0.61 million
#7Materials$0.60 million
#8Tech$0.48 million
#9Consumer Discretionary$0.42 million
#10Industrials$0.32 million

Note: this analysis excludes real estate companies

Interestingly, there is even a wide variance between sectors. Oil and gas companies make at least twice as much revenue per employee than the companies in all other sectors, while healthcare and utilities companies also have high ratios as well.

There is a plausible explanation for this large discrepancy, and it has to do with the cost of doing business.

Oil and gas companies have to spend billions of dollars on capital expenditures to build and maintain plants and rigs, while paying extra taxes and royalties. Healthcare companies have to spend a lot on R&D to stay competitive, while utilities must maintain vast amounts of infrastructure. At the same time, all of these sectors generally hire very specialized employees like engineers or scientists, which cost more than average.

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Energy

How Much Does the U.S. Depend on Russian Uranium?

Currently, Russia is the largest foreign supplier of nuclear power fuel to the U.S.

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Voronoi graphic visualizing U.S. reliance on Russian uranium

How Much Does the U.S. Depend on Russian Uranium?

This was originally posted on Elements. Sign up to the free mailing list to get beautiful visualizations on natural resource megatrends in your email.

The U.S. House of Representatives recently passed a ban on imports of Russian uranium. The bill must pass the Senate before becoming law.

In this graphic, we visualize how much the U.S. relies on Russian uranium, based on data from the United States Energy Information Administration (EIA).

U.S. Suppliers of Enriched Uranium

After Russia invaded Ukraine, the U.S. imposed sanctions on Russian-produced oil and gas—yet Russian-enriched uranium is still being imported.

Currently, Russia is the largest foreign supplier of nuclear power fuel to the United States. In 2022, Russia supplied almost a quarter of the enriched uranium used to fuel America’s fleet of more than 90 commercial reactors.

Country of enrichment serviceSWU%
🇺🇸 United States3,87627.34%
🇷🇺 Russia3,40924.04%
🇩🇪 Germany1,76312.40%
🇬🇧 United Kingdom1,59311.23%
🇳🇱 Netherlands1,3039.20%
Other2,23215.79%
Total14,176100%

SWU stands for “Separative Work Unit” in the uranium industry. It is a measure of the amount of work required to separate isotopes of uranium during the enrichment process. Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration

Most of the remaining uranium is imported from European countries, while another portion is produced by a British-Dutch-German consortium operating in the United States called Urenco.

Similarly, nearly a dozen countries around the world depend on Russia for more than half of their enriched uranium—and many of them are NATO-allied members and allies of Ukraine.

In 2023 alone, the U.S. nuclear industry paid over $800 million to Russia’s state-owned nuclear energy corporation, Rosatom, and its fuel subsidiaries.

It is important to note that 19% of electricity in the U.S. is powered by nuclear plants.

The dependency on Russian fuels dates back to the 1990s when the United States turned away from its own enrichment capabilities in favor of using down-blended stocks of Soviet-era weapons-grade uranium.

As part of the new uranium-ban bill, the Biden administration plans to allocate $2.2 billion for the expansion of uranium enrichment facilities in the United States.

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