A fun flip side is that you have companies like Vizio who are making a killing in commoditized electronics who outsource virtually everything and still have less then 200 employees (About 1/3 are support).
* Recognized as the #1 Fastest Growing CE Company by Inc. Magazine
* Total of 100 employees
* Shipped a total of 3,500,000 HDTVs
* Total revenue exceeds 2 Billion Dollars
Had not really noticed Vizio before, seems like an amazing story.
10million revenue per employee is a huge number (as a comparison Apple, Google had 1 million per employee in 2009, which is already considered on the high side)
Just doing some casual research:
One of the founders had two other monitor startups (MAG and Princeton Digital) under his belt, so that sort of explains some of the success.
Still, it seems like an amazing achievement to get into the big retail channels so quickly.
How do they manage to create so much value, while keeping track of all the outsourcing? Surely, there must be times when things go wrong, really wrong with the outsourcing.
Revenue per employee makes no sense. What makes sense is profit per employee. Vizio outsources stuff and pays loads to other companies, their profits have a lower ration that 10 million per employee
Edit: AmTran sometimes swallows shipping costs and pushes component suppliers to ensure Vizio's products are high quality and on time. AmTran now gets about 80% of its revenue from Vizio. In turn, Vizio sources as many as 85% of its TVs from AmTran, according to research firm DisplaySearch.
http://www.vizio.com/about