Amazon Now Has Twice as Many Employees as Apple

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An Amazon employee
Photograph by Philippe Huguen — AFP/Getty Images

Amazon has been on a hiring spree lately, as illustrated by today’s updated chart from Jan Dawson of Jackdaw Research:

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America’s largest retailer online or off—it surpassed Walmart (WMT) last year—now employs nearly 240,000 people. That’s twice Apple’s (AAPL) headcount and nearly four times Google’s (GOOGL).

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Much of the hiring Amazon does, of course, is of a very different nature than the rest of the U.S. tech giants.

“Amazon is the only one of these companies that has a significant portion of its employees in very low-skill jobs with commensurately low wages,” writes Dawson. “So it can afford to generate under half a million dollars per employee on average annually.”

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Apple also engages the labor of large numbers of relatively low-wage workers, both in its retail operations and in the factories that assemble its products. But the lowest-paid workers in the company’s supply chain are employed by subcontractors, which is how Apple is able to generate, at least on paper, nearly $2 million per employee.

For more on Apple, watch:

Dawson’s post was published behind the Techpinions paywall. You can read it for 50 cents or subscribe to the full feed for $10 per month.

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