Swiss watch industry: 2016 exports the worst year

Swiss watch exports registered one of its shallowest falls of last year in December, yet marking a decline for the whole of 2016, figures from the Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry showed Thursday.

Watch exports declined 4.6% year-on-year in December to CHF 1.7 billion. Exports for the whole year tumbled 9.9% to CHF 19.4 billion. The annual decline is the worst performance since exports fell 22 percent in 2009 in the wake of the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers and the subprime mortgage crisis.

The trend of Swiss watch industry exports continued to recover in December while remaining negative, the group said. Overall volumes rose slightly for the first time in 18 months.

Among the main markets, demand from the U.S., China, Japan and the U.K. improved, while exports to Hong Kong, Singapore, the UAE, main European markets and South Korea declined in December.

The watch federation said it expects exports to stabilize in 2017 as initial signs of a rebound emerge. Richemont, which makes watches under a dozen brands, has reported a return to growth in sales of watches at its own stores in the final three months of 2016, as the Geneva-based company said in a statement last week. 

The Swiss watch industry isn’t new to trauma. It survived the quartz crisis, in which competition from battery-powered watches in the 1970s and 1980s led some 60,000 jobs to disappear. Swatch’s namesake mass-market plastic watch kept factories running, helping the industry survive.