Wall Street has been falling over themselves singing the praises of Apple stock as the Cupertino, Calif. company smashes sales expectations for its unique gizmos sold at premium prices. However, the average Apple employee salary is about a 10th that of one Wall Street powerhouse, reportedly.
Despite Apple’s returns being much higher than Goldman Sachs (which reported its profit figures Wednesday), the average employee of the tech giant earns $46,000 versus $430,700 at Goldman, according to number-crunchers at the New Yorker.
No matter what performance metric you use to measure the two firms, Apple always comes out ahead. Goldman’s Return on Equity in 2010 was 11.5 percent, while Apple’s was 32 percent. The Wall Street investment bank’s Return on Assets (how much profit is squeezed from the buildings, machines and other physical property) was around .91 percent in 2010, while Apple’s ROA of about 20.3 percent.
With such numbers, you’d think Apple employees are richly rewarded. Not true, according to the magazine. The Simply Hired web site figures the average Apple worker (not the high-profile executive) takes home annually about $46,000. Another site – Salary List – provides a much higher figure: $107,719. However, the site doesn’t figure in the many employees at Apple’s over 300 retail locations. Officially, Apple doesn’t release labor costs.
Of course, the one flaw in the comparison is that Apple has relatively few rivals that can compete head-on with the iPhone or iPad. If an investor doesn’t like Goldman, they can easily take their business to Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan or a number of other investment houses offering essentially the same service.
However, it does make you scratch your head about the pay-scale equity of one of the currently most-profitable businesses operating.
