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Corona Virus Chronicle Watch Market
Corona Virus Chronicle Watch Market
A CHANGE OF PARADIGM
We are not going to blind you with figures at this point. It
is true that China saw its watch imports drop 51.05% in
February (according to the Federation of the Swiss
Watch Industry), and while some people are reassuring
themselves that “the doors are already opening again”,
or, like Nick Hayek as recently as 19 March, that “once
the crisis is past we can start up again without any
problem and attack the market”, all the other fountains
and water tanks are now overflowing as well: Europe,
today California, soon New York, tomorrow the rest of the
world – and so it will go on until the pandemic dies down.
How long will that take? No one knows.
But above all, this pandemic crisis comes on the back of
another crisis, possibly a complete reassessment.
“Attacking the market”, as Nick Hayek puts it, is certainly
going to demand different arms and ammunition than
usual.
Indeed, the predominating watchmaking model of the past decade was
already struggling well before the coronavirus came on the scene. Before the
viral wave began to unfurl, the Swiss watch industry had already gone
gleefully upmarket, taking refuge in the lofty havens of the luxury segment. In
so doing, it was simply following the lead of the prevailing economic models,
continuously gouging out a deeper gap between the 1% and the rest (in 2018,
Switzerland exported fewer than 24 million watches compared with 860 million
in the case of China and Hong Kong, but its turnover rose from 8.4 to 19.9
billion francs in 10 years. For the historian Pierre-Yves Donzé, the period
1998-2018 saw the birth of “big watchmaking business”).