Have you ever wondered how Santa manages to distribute all the world’s Christmas presents so efficiently every year? Especially considering that there are 760 million Christian children in the world alone?

Thanks to Paul Tronsor from FedEx and Mike Mangeot from UPS, we can now get a pretty accurate idea of the number of employees Santa would need in order to deliver at least one gift to each child.

Here are just a few of the positions Santa would need to fill (for the complete list, see the graphic at the bottom of this post):

• Santa would need 46 international distribution centers. These would allow him to reload as he crosses the globe. That also means 400 000 workers for loading presents onto Santa’s sleigh.
• He’ll need a further 60 000 workers to develop optimised flight plans and communicate with global airports, secure flyover rights, etc.
• Another 7 000 people to monitor demand and to tweak Santa’s route in real time.
• 100 meteorologists will constantly have to make sure that Santa doesn’t fly into a blizzard.
• In order to clear the various customs offices around the world, he will also need an army of 40 000 people.

To give you a sense of how big that team is, that’s 40 times the number of current employees at FedEx!

[Source: NPR]