Not that long ago, when the COVID-19 quarantine was just starting, we reported that the big tech companies that had previously crossed over into being worth over $1 trillion (on paper, at least) were seeing a precipitous fall in their market value.
It was looking bad for Apple, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft at the time.
Now, a mere four months later, a new report from ForexSchoolOnline, shows there was never any need for you to worry.
Those companies, plus Facebook (the other member of the top-five US tech companies, a.k.a.
the Frightful Five, that control pretty much all of our digital lives) have bounced back nicely.
The five together are worth a full $6.4 trillion as of this month.
Apple alone is worth $1.68 trillion.
The chart above goes year by year and doesn't show the drop from the coronavirus, because why bother? The increase across the five companies from June 2019 to July 2020 is 53 percent; the dip was a blip.
Apple and Amazon in particular had big increases.
The lowest increase was Facebook, which still isn't worth $1 trillion (just a meager $690 billion).
All of that is impressive, but there are other more impressive and fun ways to measure how well a company is doing.
Take Netflix, for instance.
Usually we'd talk about its subscriber base, which is admittedly staggering, at 192.95 million paying subscribers as of Q2 2020.
That's an increase of over 41 million since the same time last year.
But the folks at UK-based BuyShares, which compiled that info above, looked at a very different metric that shows how well Netflix is doing compared to all the other tech companies beyond the Frightful Five—examining the revenue per employee.
(That's total revenue divided by number of employees, a simple to calculate metric if you've got the data.)
Netflix makes $2.34 million dollars per employee, $444,000 and change more per employee than Apple and well ahead of even Facebook and Alphabet.
eBay is kind of surprisingly well represented in this list, at $812,030 earned per employee.
And maybe the least surprising surprise of all is that Amazon is as the bottom of the top ten at only $351,531 US dollars per employee—probably because the company needs to have an army of staff to keep the warehouses and supermarkets running.
If Netflix shared even a pittance of that down to every single worker, those 8,600 employees (as of 2019) would be pretty rich, a nice position for a company that started with 30 people rending discs by mail back in 1997.
But I'd bet it would prefer a valuation over a trillion bucks.
(As of today, Netflix market cap is worth $213 billion.)
Let's throw in another fun Netflix graphic while we're at it.
How big is the Netflix library of videos that's generating all that revenue per employee? Reviews.org has the details.
