(News Bulletin 247) – The bestbrokers.com website established a ranking in a recent study by simply dividing the profits of large listed groups by their overall workforce. Certain sectors, such as oil, tech and finance, stand out in particular.

Even if it is not always the most relevant financial indicator for assessing the financial health of a listed company (cash generation is sometimes much more critical), net profit has the merit of simplicity.

While the results season is clearly going to accelerate in France after having taken off this week in the United States, the site bestbrokers.com has ranked the groups which generate the biggest profits per employee.

This ratio “directly measures individual contributions to the success of the company. It is also a good indicator of a company’s productivity and the efficiency and streamlining of its operations,” explains Paul Hoffman, market analyst for bestbrokers.com.

To build its ranking, the site looked at the world’s 200 largest publicly traded companies based on data from companiesmarketcap.com, taking their net profits for the most recent published financial year and then relating them to each company’s total workforce, based on their annual report. The site then harmonised the data in dollars.

Bestbrokers.com thus arrives at the ranking reproduced in our infographic below.

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Oil majors well represented

Let’s clarify from the outset that profit per employee depends on the sectors, depending on whether an industry is more or less capital or labor intensive. For example, Walmart is the listed group in the world that generates the largest annual turnover ($624 billion in the last financial year), but the company is absent from the top 20 simply because distribution remains a sector with low profitability (4.2% operating margin in the last financial year) and a large number of employees (more than 2 million). Walmart’s net profit per employee ultimately amounts to around $7,750, very far from the top 20 (the bar is set at $468,000).

On the contrary, oil, energy, technology or pharmaceuticals, which above all require significant investments in infrastructure, R&D and/or cutting-edge technologies, display much higher ratios.

A look at the top 20 shows this. At the top of the ranking is the Saudi oil major Saudi Aramco with a profit per employee of $1.65 million. Remember that Saudi Aramco is quite simply the listed group in the world that generates the highest absolute profits, with a net result of more than $120 billion for its 2023 financial year (and a record of $161.1 billion in 2022).

The oil sector is also well represented: ConocoPhillips is third in the ranking (1.1 million dollars per employee), the Chinese CNOOC sixth (774,000 dollars), the Abu Dhabi company Taqa eleventh (649,620 dollars), Exxonmobil 14th (580.81 dollars), the Brazilian Petrobras 16th (532,510 dollars) and Chevron 20th (468,620 dollars).

The second group in this ranking is not very well known. It is the American company Prologis, a specialist player in logistics real estate and warehouse management. This company generated a profit of “only” 3 billion dollars in 2023, but the company had only 2,574 employees at the end of December 2023, resulting in a very high profit per person of 1.2 million dollars.

Swedish group first in Europe

Tech is also very present. Nvidia, a Wall Street star for two years, is in fourth place ($1.01 million per employee), the American semiconductor group Broadcom comes in seventh place ($704,000), Airbnb is eighth ($693,000), Apple twelfth ($602,450), Meta fifteenth ($563,000), Arista Networks ($518,850), an American group specializing in technological solutions for data centers, 17th, and Pinduoduo ($474,580), a Chinese e-commerce giant that notably owns Temu, 19th.

Other members of the top 10 include asset management giant KKR, fifth with $819,000, US pharmaceutical group Vertex, ninth with $670,000 and Swedish investment firm Investor AB, with $660,000.

This Swedish group has stakes in many listed Swedish groups, such as the Seb bank, the Saab defence group, the household appliance specialist Electrolux, the Swedish-British pharmaceutical group Astrazeneca and the garden and forestry tools group Husqvarna.

Investor AB also tops a European ranking by bestbrokers.com. Another investment firm, the Dutch Prosus, which specializes in investments in tech companies, such as fintechs and food delivery companies, is second ($313,850 per employee).

UBS is third with $242,000 per employee. The Swiss bank had seen its net profit inflated by accounting items (badwill, to simplify, the difference between the price actually paid and the accounting value) linked to the acquisition of Credit Suisse, the terms of which were very favorable to UBS. The American-Swiss insurer Chubb, listed in New York, comes in fourth ($225,000).

The French groups Hermes ($212,000) and Totalenergies ($208,000) follow. The European top 10 is completed by the Dutch champion of critical technologies for the semiconductor industry ASML ($200,000), the Swiss pharmaceutical group Novartis ($195,000), the largest European capitalization Novo Nordisk ($189,000), and the Anglo-Dutch oil major Shell ($188,000).