A journalist of the famous American publication The New Yorker analyzed the financial results of Apple and Goldman Sachs to find out which of the 2 companies is more profitable. Both had good financial results in the last year, but Apple is much more profitable than Goldman Sachs because it produces devices desired by millions of people worldwide. Although Apple produces tens of billions of dollars annually, the company's employees do not earn an extraordinary amount of money, at least conform the Simply Hired website. The statistics on that site indicate that an Apple employee earns on average about $46.000 annually, that is a little over $3800 monthly, a colossal salary for Romania and quite good for the USA.
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? Part of the answer is an accounting flaw. Unlike some corporations, Apple doesn't record on its balance sheet much of the value of its patents and other intellectual property—the look and feel of the iPad, for example. If it did this, the figure for total assets recorded on its books would be considerably higher, and its ROA would be lower. But accounting is only a small part of the story. (As far as I know, Goldman doesn't capitalize its intellectual capital, such as it is, either.)
Apple does not offer extraordinarily high salaries to its employees, but it offers them discounts for purchasing products from the company's portfolio, bonuses for reaching certain targets plus other advantages. I think you have heard enough stories about the hard life of Apple employees who work from morning to night, but in Romania I think that anyone would do the same job for this money.
