Apple is now king in terms of yearly profit per employee. In fact, Cupertino is miles ahead of many tech companies, including Google, Microsoft, Intel, Cisco, eBay, Adobe, Yahoo, Oracle, IBM, Amazon, HP, and Dell, as chosen by Pingdom.

Profit per employee is an interesting metric because it gives you a number that doesn't depend too much on the workforce of the company. This makes it easier to compare companies of different sizes.

Apple moved from $151,063 profit per employee in 2008 to $419,528 per employee in the past 12 months. This pushed it to first place, taking the crown away from Google.

This change did not occur because Google has been doing poorly, but rather because Apple's profits have been growing rapidly and it has never been this profitable before. In fact, Apple's profit per employee is 1.25 times that of Google's and 1.71 times that of Microsoft's, which is now in third place.

Since 2008, Apple's profit per employee has grown 2.8 times, Intel's profit per employee has doubled, Google's profit per employee has grown 1.8 times, and Microsoft's profit per employee has grown 1.3 times. Yahoo actually seems to have become more profitable in the past couple of years, in spite of all the bad press. Cisco, eBay, Adobe, Amazon, and Dell have lower profits per employee now than in 2008.

It's also worth taking a look at total employee numbers. Apple has added more than twice as many new employees as Google in the past couple of years, but still managed to pass the search giant.

Yahoo has exactly the same number of employees now as in 2008, while Microsoft actually shrunk its operation by 2,000 employees. Meanwhile, HP's and IBM's profit per employee isn't very high likely because of the significant overhead required to run such large companies.

We're wondering what company will pass Apple in a few years. Will it be one of the companies already listed, a startup, or maybe a firm that still hasn't been formed.