John Cassidy, of The New Yorker, writes:
Contrary to appearances, I’m not obsessed with Goldman Sachs, and this will be my last post on the subject for a while. But the Wall Street firm issued its latest profit report today, and I thought it would be interesting to compare its results to those of Apple, another iconic American business, which yesterday published its own profit figures.
Many people are put off by financial accounts, but they provide an invaluable window into what is really going on in a given corporation, and to how much it is contributing to society. I may be weird, but sometimes I actually like poking around in 10-Qs, 8-Ks, and other disclosure forms that public companies have to file with the Securities and Exchange Commission. One word of warning, though. What follows should be considered a process of me thinking out loud, and pointing out some things that strike me, rather than reaching any definitive conclusions.
As everybody knows, Goldman and Apple are both making tons of money (although Goldman’s latest results disappointed investors somewhat). In the final quarter of 2010, the bank generated net profits of $2.39 billion on revenues of $8.64 billion. Apple, which has a much bigger turnover, made profits of $6 billion on revenues of $26.4 billion.
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Another way to gauge a firm’s performance is to take everything it possesses—its buildings, its machinery and other equipment, its product designs, and its financial holdings—and look at how much profit it generates for each dollar of assets on its books. In my opinion, this measure, which is known as return on assets (ROA), is the best way to judge a business, because it excludes the amplifying effect of leverage. Now let’s apply it to Goldman and Apple.
According to its latest filing with the S.E.C., Goldman ended 2010 with assets of $911 billion, which means its ROA for the year was roughly .91 per cent. (Yes, that is less than one per cent.) Apple ended 2010 with total assets of $86.7 billion, which means it generated an ROA of about 20.3 per cent.
To summarize: Apple isn’t merely generating a higher return on the capital it employs than Goldman; it is more than twenty times as profitable! How can this be?
(click to continue reading Rational Irrationality: Goldman Vs. Apple: Who Generates the Highest Economic Return? : The New Yorker.)
Maybe I’m irrational, but I have less than zero interest in working for Goldman Sachs, and would love to even be an outside vendor for Apple, Inc., even though Goldman employees are paid much, much more than Apple employees:
Another thing that differentiates Goldman from Apple is how much it pays its employees. In 2010, Goldman’s 35,700 employees took home an average of $430,700. Apple doesn’t publish much information about its labor costs. According to the jobs Web site Simply Hired, the average salary at Apple is $46,000. Another Web site, Salary List, quotes a substantially higher figure—$107,719—but that doesn’t appear to include people working at Apple’s more than three hundred retail stores. Whichever number is more accurate, the basic message is the same. Apple employees earn a lot less than their counterparts at Goldman despite the fact they generate a much higher return—private and social—on the capital they use.