Emigres rule as Facebook tops in per-employee profit

In what should make US President Donald Trump do a rethink on his policies to discourage emigration, it emerges that American technology companies like Apple, Google parent Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook, Oracle, IBM, Paypal, and eBay – with a combined market cap of over $3 trillion – are all founded and run by people of foreign origin!

Apple's Steve Jobs was the child of Syrian immigrants; Google's Sergey Brin is a Russian immigrant; Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg's ancestors came to the US from Germany, Poland and Austria; while PayPal co-founder Elon Musk was born in South Africa.

Meanwhile, Facebook has overtaken Microsoft and Alphabet in securing maximum profit per employee in the second quarter of 2017, while Twitter suffered a hefty loss, a media reports said.

Facebook, which employed 20,658 persons in the past quarter - a 43 per cent increase over the same period last year - made $188,498 (around Rs1.2 crore) per employee, according to a report in ReCode.

Microsoft made $52,400 (Rs33 lakh) and Alphabet $46,610 per employee - four times less profit per employee than the social media giant - in the three months that ended 30 June.

Verizon, AT&T and Ford followed with $27,405, $15,410 and $10,098 per employee.

Twitter, which saw a net loss of $116 million last quarter, lost nearly $36,000 per employee.

The reason for Facebook's apparent employee efficiency is that software products do not require humans for the production and distribution process.

As even jobs formerly assigned to humans are coming under the purview of robots - so more industries could see consolidation of labour, the report added.

The research was restricted to select major companies that have reported their employee count in their latest quarterly earnings, and did not include Apple as they do not have a quarterly updated headcount.