🗞 The 5 Most Profitable Companies (per Employee)

Happy Sunday! 👋 

This week we’re taking a quick look at the 5 companies in North America that generate the highest profit per employee.

Let’s dive in!

The 5 Most Profitable Companies per Employee

Measuring a company’s efficiency can be difficult.

50 years ago, perhaps the best barometer for efficiency would have been measuring the output of physical assets (ROA, ROIC, ROCE, etc.).

But in the modern age, where the leading businesses in the world are built largely on intangible assets, workforce productivity is perhaps a better measuring stick.

With that in mind, here are the 5 most profitable companies on a per employee basis.

**Note** We’ve excluded several industries (REITs, Energy, etc.) from this list due to how they account for employees. Holding company structures can distort the true size of a workforce.

1. Nvidia

• Total Employees: 42,000

• Annual Operating Profit per Employee: $5.1 million

Not too much of a surprise here.

Nvidia is projected to finish as the most profitable company on the planet this year with analysts currently estimating $269 billion in FY27 operating income, up from $4 billion in 2023.

That’s a 66-fold earnings increase in the span of 4 years. Over that same timeframe, Nvidia’s employee count has risen by just 61% going from 26k to 42k.

That lopsided growth in earnings compared to headcount has put Nvidia head and shoulders above any other company.

2. AppLovin

• Total Employees: 898

• Annual Operating Profit per Employee: $4.1 million

For those unfamiliar, AppLovin is a mobile advertising technology company. Developers integrate the AppLovin SDK into their mobile app, and their ad-space is then made available for real-time auctions among AppLovin’s network of advertisers.

In late 2025, in an effort to force faster adoption of AI, AppLovin cut about 43% of its staff. This brought the employee count down from 1,563 to just 898 in a matter of months.

Now, AppLovin is the only company in North America with a market cap above $100 billion while employing less than 1,000 people.

3. Altria

• Total Employees: 5,900

• Annual Operating Profit per Employee: $1.8 million

Altria is an outlier on this list.

If you look at the rest of the companies on here, you’ll notice that they are all either: A) Exceptionally asset-light, or B) Benefitting from one of the largest tailwinds of all-time (the AI infrastructure buildout).

Neither of those describes Altria.

Altria, the parent company behind Marlboro, operates primarily in a dying industry (cigarettes) that requires physical manufacturing (asset-intensive). Most companies in that position probably wouldn’t be a contender for this list. However, with Altria having now been around for over 200 years, it’s fair to say they’ve had plenty of time to streamline their operations.

And that’s exactly what they’ve done.

Over the last two decades, Altria shed most of their non-core assets like Kraft Foods and Miller Brewing to focus exclusively on their US tobacco business. They also consolidated their manufacturing footprint from several nationwide locations to a single massive, hyper-automated facility in Richmond, Virginia. These efforts reduced Altria’s total employee count from ~10,000 in 2009 to 5,900 today.

When you pair those cost reductions with the fact that a cigarette sells for $0.50 and costs about a penny to make, it starts to make more sense how they’ve become so profitable on a per-employee basis.

4. NMI Holdings

• Total Employees: 225

• Annual Net Income per Employee: $1.7 million

NMI Holdings is one of the largest private mortgage insurance companies in America (by premiums).

In America, any time a home buyer puts down less than 20% of the purchase price at closing, they are required to purchase private mortgage insurance. With private mortgage insurance, if the homeowner defaults on their payments, the insurance underwriter (NMI in this case) pays the lender to cover some of their losses. This helps borrowers purchase homes even if they don’t have a lot of money to put down initially.

Once a private mortgage insurer’s software is integrated within a lender’s workflow, they don’t often switch providers and there’s essentially no maintenance cost. This leads to ultra low-cost premium growth, and ultimately, major operating leverage.

And that’s exactly what NMI Holdings has experienced.

Today, NMI generates just under $400M in annual net income. For a 225-person company working out of a modest, shared office in Emeryville, California, that is truly remarkable output.

5. Micron

• Total Employees: 53,000

• Annual Operating Profit per Employee: $1.1 million

Micron actually wouldn’t make this list based on trailing 12-month numbers. However, as you can see with the chart below, over the next 12 months they could very easily move to the top, so I figured it could be worth the inclusion.

It’s no secret that the AI infrastructure buildout has been a massive boon to the leading memory chip providers. A single AI server requires 8x-10x more memory capacity than a traditional cloud server. This has resulted in an explosion in demand for companies like Micron.

But while demand looks to be ever-growing, Micron is physically incapable of matching it with production growth since building new fabrication capacity requires significant lead time. This supply-demand mismatch has created major price increases coupled with minimal expense growth. The perfect formula for short-term operating leverage.

In Q2, Micron generated $660k in quarterly operating profit per employee, up 1,275% compared to a year prior. And assuming management’s guidance is at least directionally correct, that figure is likely going to rise in the coming quarters.

That’s all for this week. 

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