Apple Profits More Than $6 Million An Hour

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Nov 27, 12:02PM EST

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Apple Profits More Than $6 Million An Hour — © Stephen Lam / Getty Images News via Getty Images

Profits at tech companies drove their stocks to all-time highs. The market capitalizations of Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon rose above $1 trillion. Profit weakness and worry about a slow economy have decreased these profits by as much as half in recent quarters. Valuation has fallen at a similar pace. However, the bottom lines are still extraordinarily high at several public corporations. Apple leads the way because it makes $157 million daily based on its net income.

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A new study by Tipalti, titled “Profit Per Second,” looked at the profits of 50 American publicly traded companies. The list was based on 2021 profits. Four companies had profits of over $100 million a day. After Apple, these were Microsoft ($121 million), Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway ($116 million), and Alphabet (owner of Google) at $110 million. Several more made over $50 million a day. These were Meta (parent of Facebook) at $78 million, JP Morgan at $78 million, Amazon at $58 million, and Intel at $57 million.

Several of these, all tech companies, were founded in the last few decades. They have been growth engines of the U.S. economy and the stock market. Profits at many have started to slow, however. Meta’s market value has dropped by more than 50% as its revenue has been eaten into by other companies that rely on advertising. Slow PC sales and competition from AMD have hurt Intel’s revenue. Amazon’s revenue has been undermined by slowing retail sales.

Apple could fall from its perch. Sales of the iPhone 14 have been lackluster. It was only a matter of time before Apple could not upgrade features on the iPhone enough to drive new buyers to stores (or online). And Apple faces the shutdown of its largest assembly plant, the Foxconn operation in China. COVID-19 and employee unrest have forced management to suspend work. Both of these circumstances could go on indefinitely.

Apple will continue to be among the most profitable companies in the world. However, those profits could fall considerably in the next year.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.