Any business needs to make money, even nonprofits need to cover their costs and have funds for investment and improvement. However, when are profits excessive? There will be different perspectives on this and such questions and answers need to be placed within a political value stream.
One measure that can be applied – and then discussed – is the ratio of a company’s profits in terms of its employees. Profit per employee is a metric that used to calculate a business’s net income divided by the total number of employees to determine how much profit employees bring in over the course of a given period.
A study carried out by Tipalti has looked at the companies on the Fortune 500 list (that is successful firms active in the U.S.) alongside their revenue in order to calculate how much profit is made per employee in these companies and sectors.
The outcome of this assessment reveals the top ten companies with most profit per employee:
| Rank | Company | Sector | Profit | No. of Employees | Profit Per Employee |
| 1 | Air Lease | Business Services | $516.3m | 120 | $4,302,500 |
| 2 | Fannie Mae | Financials | $11.8bn | 7,700 | $1,533,117 |
| 3 | KKR | Financials | $2.0bn | 1,583 | $1,265,003 |
| 4 | NortonLifeLock | Technology | $3.9bn | 3,600 | $1,079,722 |
| 5 | Freddie Mac | Financials | $7.3bn | 6,922 | $1,058,365 |
| 6 | Vertex Pharmaceuticals | Health Care | $2.7bn | 3,400 | $797,529 |
| 7 | Altria Group | Food, Beverages and Tobacco | $4.5bn | 7,100 | $629,155 |
| 8 | Visa | Business Services | $10.9bn | 20,500 | $530,049 |
| 9 | Enterprise Products Partners | Energy | $3.8bn | 7,130 | $529,537 |
| 10 | Western Midstream Partners | Energy | $527m | 1,045 | $504,306 |
Looking at the top three companies in the table, despite taking a write-down of $802.4 million in April, on 27 aircrafts remaining in Russia, Air Lease Corp. is the company making the most profit per employee.
In second place is the U.S. government-sponsored entity Fannie Mae, which has seen its share being traded nearly 26 percent higher on the 14th of July for no obvious reason, is also crowned second place for making the most profit per employee.
In third places is KKR, which has just reached a deal to invest $1 billion for a minority stake in Northumbrian Water Group.
Overall, the financial industry is the sector with the highest average profit per employee. In fact, it tops the list for the highest profit per employee, with an average of $78,073. It is perhaps unsurprising that technology also follows closely behind and ranks very highly, with an average profit per employee of $77,961.
In contrast, energy companies had a huge loss of $78,123 per employee. They were one of only three sectors that had a negative profit/loss ratio per employee in the past year, with the others being the transportation and hospitality sectors.
For many businesses, profit per employee is not an especially useful metric. It does not provide an indicator of efficiency or of the contribution per employee. For workers it can be a source of discontent.
These types of figures inevitably lead to discussions about pay equity and how well the profits of a company are passed onto those who actually generate the profit in the first place – the workers.
