Revenue Per Employee

XOM - Exxon Mobil
CVX - Chevron
SNDK - SanDisk (storage card maker, memory chips)
QCOM - Qualcom
VMW - VMware

Revenue per employee is quite a useless measure. It means nothing in the general sense. Raking them would always yield two types of companies: oil and technology companies. It only starts to make sense when you benchmark them on a same industry basis.

Revenue per employee measure is more relevant for labour intensive industries and not capital intensive industries. Labour intensive would be a direct correlation between the output and efficiency of each additional employee to the company.

Oil is oil, it just gushes and it is capital intensive. However technology companies may be better bets as number of employees are not that important compared to patented knowledge and patent library.

Revenue per employee may be of use in looking at the same company trend over a period of time, in particular on a quarterly basis over 5 years. It helps to get a feel, especially when the company has a large employee base (e.g. over 10,000).

Careful use of the Sales per Employee metric can reveal a great deal about the management of a company that you might not learn from other financial measures. How much of a premium are customers willing to pay for a company’s products, how well does the company manage personnel expenses, and perhaps most important of all, how good is management’s recruiting and hiring practices?

Most of the companies on the list would be familiar to most readers. A couple of companies that may be under the radar are SanDisk and VMware:

SanDisk Corporation designs, develops, manufactures, and markets NAND-based flash storage card products that are used in various consumer electronics products. Flash storage technology allows digital information to be stored in a durable, compact format that retains the data even after the power has been switched off. It offers removable cards, embedded products, universal serial bus flash drives, and flash-based digital media players, as well as wafers and components. The company’s removable card products are used in various consumer electronics devices, such as mobile phones, digital cameras, gaming devices, and laptop computers; and embedded flash products are used in mobile phones, navigation devices, gaming systems, imaging devices, and computing platforms.

As a major player in memory chips, SanDisk is widely expected to benefit from rising demand for mobile-computing devices, such as the iPad. Indeed, SanDisk shares have soared more than 40% since the beginning of the year.

VMware, Inc. provides virtualization infrastructure software solutions and related support and services primarily in the United States. The company’s virtualization software solutions support a range of operating system and application environments, as well as networking and storage infrastructures. It provides VMware vSphere, a data center platform, which helps companies along the path of cloud computing by providing compatible IT infrastructures.



The company offers solutions that enable organizations to aggregate multiple servers, storage infrastructure, and networks together into shared pools of capacity. It provides products that address various infrastructure needs, such as planned and unplanned downtime management, system recoverability, backup and recovery, resource provisioning and management, capacity and performance management, and security. VMware, Inc. provides various desktop products and technologies comprising View Manager that provides session management and security services; View Composer, which offers desktop image provisioning, management, and storage reduction; and VMware ThinApp that enables quick application delivery.

The company also offers client-hosted desktop virtualization products, including Workstation that enables to create multiple secure virtual sandboxes on a single computer; and Fusion that enables Windows and Windows applications on an Intel processor-powered Apple OS X Macintosh computer. In addition, it provides various support services; consulting services for implementation of virtualization solutions; and education services that provide hands-on labs, case study examples, and course materials.