The Largest Company Headquartered in Each State, by Number of Employees

The Largest Company Headquartered in Each State

Today’s infographic comes to us from Business Insider, and it shows the largest company headquartered in each state, based on headcount data from CapRelo.

Employees Versus Revenue

In order to be considered one of the largest corporations in America, a company needs to have thousands of employees and billions in revenue. Yet, while it may be intuitive to expect the top companies to be leaders in terms of both revenue and headcount, it’s actually much less common than one would think.

Compare the above list based on number of employees to our previous post on the largest company in each state by revenue to see the very limited overlap.

Nike (Oregon), GE (Connecticut), GM (Michigan), and Berkshire Hathaway (Nebraska) are some of the rare examples of companies being #1 in both categories. However, the list of counterexamples is even longer.

Here are some of the more interesting ones:

• Starbucks, based in Washington State, has the most employees, but Costco reigns supreme in terms of revenue.
• In New York, IBM has the biggest headcount, but Verizon tops Big Blue with about $40 billion more revenue each year.
• HP is California’s leader by total employees, but Chevron takes top spot for revenue.
• Lowe’s beats Bank of America in North Carolina in terms of the number of employees, but not revenue.
• Exxon Mobil (Texas) is one of the world’s largest corporations in terms of revenue and market capitalization. Dallas-based AT&T has more employees, though.
• In New Jersey, Cognizant Technology Solutions is the biggest company by employees – but it can’t compete with Johnson & Johnson for revenue.

It’s tempting to generalize that more retail and service-focused brands like Starbucks and Lowe’s will always have a higher ratio of employees-to-revenue than companies in energy, technology, or financial sectors. It appears that is not necessarily true, though.

Consider IBM and Verizon, which are both based in New York, as an example. Verizon is the bigger company in terms of revenues and market capitalization, but it has less than half the amount of employees of IBM. This is even despite 2,330 retail locations for Verizon Wireless, and owning labor-intensive mass media businesses through its AOL and Yahoo subsidiaries.