This Company Has the Most Profits per Employee

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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This Company Has the Most Profits per Employee

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Companies with high profits and revenue per employee are presumed to be the most successful. Alphabet, Microsoft and Meta Platforms, owner of Facebook, are such companies. These tech firms are among the largest in the United States, based on revenue, and are among the youngest large companies. Several were founded in the past 25 years. However, a group of relatively small companies leads the list of highest profit per employee.

Data for the recent “Profit per Employee” research paper from software company Tipalti came from the Fortune 500. Among the findings was that “There were 914 major companies in the study, and out of these the majority made profit per employee in the last year, 676 had a positive ratio compared to just 238 which made a loss per employee.”

The most profitable company by this measure was Air Lease. Its figure was $516 million per employee, based on profits of $4.3 billion and an employee count of 120.

Air Lease buys passenger planes and leases them to airlines. The process allows carriers that do not have capital access to planes. Air Lease makes its profit largely off the interest it charges these carriers. Hurt by the trouble with the aviation industry caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, its financials have started to recover.
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When the company announced its 2021 results, John L. Plueger, chief executive officer and president, commented: “We had a strong fourth quarter and second half of 2021 that benefited from continuing airline industry recovery, as seen in our cash collections, operating metrics, fleet expansion, and record lease placement.”

Air Lease owns 474 planes that it leases to 118 customers in 60 countries. The company is based in Los Angeles.

Very few of the companies with the highest profit per employee are large tech companies. Meta is higher among these, at just over $478,000, which ranks its 11th based on 58,000 workers. Several financial firms come ahead of it. Mortgage giant Fannie Mae has profits of $1.5 million per employee, which number 7,700. This places it second on the list. The third is private equity firm KKR, at $1.3 million per employee on a base of 1,583 workers.

Click here to see the largest employer in each state.
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Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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