US and Foreign Employment & Sales by MNCs

Newly released BEA report, Summary Estimates for Multinational Companies: Employment, Sales, and Capital Expenditures for 2010.   They just have one little chart on their website:

So I put together a few more.  Here are a couple on their employment data (from tables available in the full report, pdf):

First, you can compare employment in the US and abroad in US-headed multinationals (I didn;t bother putting the date range breaks in, as in chart 1 above):

The numbers are in millions of employees.  This seems to indicate that there was an upward trend of foreign hiring up until some time between 2004 and 2007, and then a holding steady of both foreign and US employment within US MNCs since then.  BEA's chart 1 seems to express this as a steady decline in US employment, which it certainly is as a percentage of total employment, but  it looks like surging foreign employment is responsible for the decline.   Also this doesn't necessarily means that grey bars represent only American citizens and orange represent only foreign citizens, since companies may move people around and it may be that many of the grey people are foreign and the orange people American, but in any event it's likely that the majority are citizens of the country in which they are employed.

They also have statistics for US employment by US affiliates of foreign-headed MNCs, but annoyingly the years do not all correspond so this looks a little odd when charted:

Even so we can see that foreign companies hire what looks like about half as many people in the US as US MNCs do abroad, and the employment in the US seems to be holding steady after a slight uptick between 1999 and 2002.

Now a couple on sales.  Here are US vs foreign sales of US-based MNCs:

Steadily rising, across the board, but look at the relative picture, sales by US Parent as a percentage of the total sales of US MNCs (BEA didn't provide this data so I calculated as USP sales/(USP sales + foreign affiliate sales):

That looks pretty startling doesn't it.  But it just means that overall, for US MNCS, foreign sales are growing faster than US sales.  That's one reason to be an MNC--expansion to other markets.

Now here are sales by US affiliates of foreign MNCs added in (again with the mismatched years):

A bit of an upward trend until 2009, no surprise there, with an uptick in 2010 but more modest than that of the US MNCs.