You can tell a lot about a company, and its future from one simple metric: sales per employee. It is also a good yardstick to measure how efficiently a company is run. Albert Lin of American Technology Research thinks that operating income per employee is a good barometer to a company’s future. He scrolled through gigabytes of data to discover that Qualcomm, is among the top 1 percentile in revenue and profits per employee among technology companies and as a result “should earn a multiple premium to peers.” Here are some comps: Qualcomm generates about $690,000 per employee per year in sales, up significantly from about $500,000. In comparison, Cisco employee brings in about $500,000 and so does a MicroSerf. Beating Qualcomm – Dell! What about operating profits per employee? “With its 30%+ operating margin, Qualcomm tops the charts with almost 2X MSFT’s performance and more than 2X that of once-mighty Intel,” says Lin. Qualcomm’s operating profits per employee are also about 3X that of DELL and nearly 10X that of IBM and TXN.