Technology
The Top 20 Tech Companies by Revenue Per Employee
The Top 20 Tech Companies by Revenue Per Employee
Whether the goal is to organize the world’s information or to build an algorithm that makes millions of lives easier, pretty much every tech company in existence aims to leverage software in some way to do the types of jobs that would otherwise be impossible or uneconomical for humans to do.
Tapping into the properties of the digital world allows these companies to do more with less. They can have global reach with minimal infrastructure, massive scale with little overhead, and impressive revenues without any physical inventory.
Tech companies can even “provide” a service by simply connecting people through a platform, rather than knowing how to perform the service itself.
“Our Greatest Asset”
With this kind of scale, every action taken by an employee packs an extra punch to have an effect on company performance. It’s why companies like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft are willing to pay an arm and a leg for the smartest engineers. These teams are not physically turning out widgets in a factory under the constraints of normal economic factors – instead, they are applying their brains to a codebase, and even the tiniest cost savings can add up when multiplied by millions of users.
Today’s visualization from cost information site HowMuch.net helps put this all in perspective by showing revenue per employee of some of the world’s largest tech companies that are a part of the S&P 500.
Here’s the data in table form:
| Rank | Company | Revenue per employee |
|---|---|---|
| #1 | Apple | $1,859,000 |
| #2 | $1,621,000 | |
| #3 | Alphabet | $1,253,000 |
| #4 | VeriSign | $1,154,000 |
| #5 | Visa | $1,062,000 |
| #6 | Mastercard | $906,000 |
| #7 | Broadcom | $843,000 |
| #8 | Lam Research | $785,000 |
| #9 | Qualcomm | $772,000 |
| #10 | Microsoft | $748,000 |
| #11 | Applied Materials | $694,000 |
| #12 | Activision Blizzard | $688,000 |
| #13 | Cisco | $684,000 |
| #14 | Xilinx | $640,000 |
| #15 | Yahoo! | $608,000 |
| #16 | PayPal | $599,000 |
| #17 | Intuit | $594,000 |
| #18 | Intel | $560,000 |
| #19 | KLA-Tencor | $535,000 |
| #20 | AMD | $521,000 |
List only based on S&P 500 companies listed in “Technology” category
Facebook, Alphabet, and Visa each bring in over $1 million in revenue per employee – and Apple rakes in nearly $2 million per person.
While these numbers are impressive, not all tech companies on the S&P 500 are masters of scale. In fact, the average tech company brings in closer to $480,000 of revenue per employee.
This amount is comparable to other sectors that make up the S&P 500, like Materials ($600,000 per employee) or Consumer Discretionary ($420,000 per employee).
Brands
How Tech Logos Have Evolved Over Time
From complete overhauls to more subtle tweaks, these tech logos have had quite a journey. Featuring: Google, Apple, and more.
How Tech Logos Have Evolved Over Time
This was originally posted on our Voronoi app. Download the app for free on iOS or Android and discover incredible data-driven charts from a variety of trusted sources.
One would be hard-pressed to find a company that has never changed its logo. Granted, some brands—like Rolex, IBM, and Coca-Cola—tend to just have more minimalistic updates. But other companies undergo an entire identity change, thus necessitating a full overhaul.
In this graphic, we visualized the evolution of prominent tech companies’ logos over time. All of these brands ranked highly in a Q1 2024 YouGov study of America’s most famous tech brands. The logo changes are sourced from 1000logos.net.
How Many Times Has Google Changed Its Logo?
Google and Facebook share a 98% fame rating according to YouGov. But while Facebook’s rise was captured in The Social Network (2010), Google’s history tends to be a little less lionized in popular culture.
For example, Google was initially called “Backrub” because it analyzed “back links” to understand how important a website was. Since its founding, Google has undergone eight logo changes, finally settling on its current one in 2015.
| Company | Number of Logo Changes |
|---|---|
| 8 | |
| HP | 8 |
| Amazon | 6 |
| Microsoft | 6 |
| Samsung | 6 |
| Apple | 5* |
Note: *Includes color changes. Source: 1000Logos.net
Another fun origin story is Microsoft, which started off as Traf-O-Data, a traffic counter reading company that generated reports for traffic engineers. By 1975, the company was renamed. But it wasn’t until 2012 that Microsoft put the iconic Windows logo—still the most popular desktop operating system—alongside its name.
And then there’s Samsung, which started as a grocery trading store in 1938. Its pivot to electronics started in the 1970s with black and white television sets. For 55 years, the company kept some form of stars from its first logo, until 1993, when the iconic encircled blue Samsung logo debuted.
Finally, Apple’s first logo in 1976 featured Isaac Newton reading under a tree—moments before an apple fell on his head. Two years later, the iconic bitten apple logo would be designed at Steve Jobs’ behest, and it would take another two decades for it to go monochrome.
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