The world’s biggest companies generate an incredible amount of money each year, with tech giants such as Apple posting annual profits of as much as $57 billion.
That’s more money than most of us will ever see in our lifetimes, so it can be difficult to get your head around the numbers and really visualise just how much the world’s biggest corporations are making.
Where it really hits home is when you see just how much money the world’s richest companies are making, not every year, but every day, hour and even second.
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Fellow tech giants Microsoft and Alphabet (the parent company of Google), as well as Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway, all also draw in more than a thousand dollars each second, which works out at over $100 million a day.
At the other end of the scale, Uber Technologies made a huge loss of $6.8 billion in 2021, equating to $215 every second. Despite being the world’s largest ride-hailing app, Uber has famously never turned a profit.
However, one thing all these companies will have in common is the use of accounts payable automation software. Any large business that deals with multiple suppliers would benefit from the streamlined efficiency that ap software provides, greatly simplifying the entire invoicing process.
Apple is one of the world’s most profitable businesses and retains the top spot that it earned in our 2020 study, generating over $157 billion a day, which equates to $1,820 every single second.
To put that into context, the average annual salary in the US is $74,738 in 2021, or $1,433.33 per week, meaning that Apple makes $387 (27.01%) more per second than the average American worker makes in a whole week.
We also looked at the average profit per second breakdown for different sectors across the whole Fortune 500 list. Companies in the technology sector were found to be making the most, averaging $185 a second, over $11,000 a minute and over $16 million each day. This was followed by companies working in telecommunications, which made $107 profit per second, and the financial sector, where companies made $85 per second.
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Having carried out this same investigation looking at the profits of Fortune 500 companies in 2020, we wanted to compare our data to see which companies have increased their profits the most in a single year.
General Electric saw the biggest increase in year-on-year profits of $10.68 billion, while Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook) is close behind with a profit increase of $10.66 billion. Online retail giant Amazon saw the third largest increase in profits, making $9.74 billion more in 2021 than they did in 2020.
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To see how well different sectors performed in 2021 compared to 2020, we calculated the difference in annual average profits between the two years.
The biggest increase in profits was seen in the Household Products sector, which more than doubled its year-on-year profits with an increase of $1,002,800,000. This huge profit boom far outperforms any other sector, as companies within the Food, Beverages and Tobacco grouping took second place having increased their average profits by $354,226,667.
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Annual profit figures sourced from the 2021 Fortune 500 All 500 companies were considered and ranked by their profit, though we chose to focus on the top 50 to make our findings more digestible.
We also compared this 2021 data to the findings of our previous study, which looked at the most profitable companies of 2020. This allowed us to reveal the companies and sectors that saw the biggest increase in annual profits.
Figures for the average annual US salary in 2021 were taken from WorldData.info and were used to highlight the scale of profits earned by Amazon.
