> After three straight years of record exports, wholesale watch exports have fallen by 2.4%<p>That sounds more like a return to the mean rather than "demand disappear[ing]"
> After three straight years of record exports, wholesale watch exports have fallen by 2.4% [...] The drop in consumer demand has hit brands making slightly less expensive watches the hardest, while top-selling brands such as Rolex and Patek Philippe have been more resilient.<p>> Sowind’s Pruniaux said there are few signs of improvement from the Chinese economy, meaning the industry might only see a partial recovery in 2025. Sowind’s sales will likely be flat or will fall slightly in 2024, he said. That compares with growth of just under 10% last year and a near-doubling of sales in 2022.<p>Seems like a bubble bursting to me...
Linking a previous hn discussion regarding the flourishing lcd casio watch mod scene. They stuff these cheap watches full of sensors, stm32 micro-controllers, screenmods & everything. It's great stuff.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28604696">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28604696</a>
This article didn't mention it but luxury watch demand went up a lot, especially for Rolex, in 2020-2021. There was abnormal demand. Prices rose a lot on the grey/second hand market. Rolex designates the MSRP to dealers and grey market prices were actually substantially higher than the MSRP dealers are required to sell at. A lot of these watches could be dealers selling them under the table. That's presumably how new watches end up on the grey market. You can search around for it online where some articles mention it and a lot of blog posts and watch forums discuss prices back then.<p>What's interesting is why that happened. It was probably a result of having more free cash available.
The thing about luxury watch makers is, the independent or family owned ones (Patek, Rolex) never seem to have a recession. LVMH and Kering own most of the other luxury brands and they mass produce these luxury watches. Patek for example cannot/will not produce more than a certain number of watches every year<p>It's just supply and demand.<p>If you are buying a luxury mechanical watch buy from an independent/family owned company rather than from LVMH or Kering.
Watch prices went up <i>a lot</i> over the past few years. As one example, an Omega Seamaster 300M was ~$3300 retail in 2018; now it's ~$6600. I'm sure that has more than a little to do with it.
When I was living in Switzerland, I went to Basel World once (Swiss rail had a nice deal). It was...weird. 50k CHF watches were considered cheap, lots of Arab and Chinese buyers, but I felt like it was a different world.
At 2.4% drop in sales and if we assume that for this year this didn't expect a decrease and increase and assume that the normal standard deviation in sales data of 1%. This would mean that we have a 2.4 sigma deviation.<p>As a particle physicist I wouldn't even report this as evidence of a problem.<p>I assumed no increase as a more modest goal after a couple of years of record sales and the current problems in world economy.
It is interesting - I follow a bunch of "finstagram" accounts. A couple of years ago, there used to be weekly "show your watch on Friday" posts with Rolexes and such. I realized after reading this article that I haven't seen such a post in a very long time. Most of these accounts post a lot less these days as well. Guess the reduction in bonuses post the Covid boom has had a massive effect on the folks who bought these watches!
May be they were luxury few decades ago but now they are useless. They cannot keep track of your sleep, steps, pulse, blood pressure, oxygen level. They don't have maps, messages etc.
I don’t think prices came down at all though. May be lowering reprises would increase demand but they don’t want to, or rather cannot to keep the brand premium. So it’s not news
Surprised to hear that Rolex is still “resilient,” most reports show all luxury brands are taking a major hit but not surprising that Ulysse Nardin and Girard Perrigeaux are hurting, the entire mid-to-high end luxury watch market got saturated not only by major brands keeping up with demand but lots of smaller, high-end microbrands such as Rexhep Rexhepi and H. Moser & Cie. entered or got noticed when the watch market got hot and boosted the market and also ate share.<p>One question I’m curious of is how many middle managers got furloughed versus labor?