Oh boy. This is likely not the news the Swiss watch industry was hoping to get in the middle of their vacation period. But the statistics don’t lie… June’s been pretty terrible.
The causes for the relatively large drop here, are not all that difficult to spot. Hong Kong has been dealing with a “little bit” of turmoil lately, so buying luxury watches hasn’t been the top priority for the region. Cool, we get that. We also continue to see pretty dramatic numbers in France, unsure if this can still be attributed to the yellow jacket movement at this point so that one does raise a few question-marks.
As per the FH: “Steel watches had a significant impact on the overall result, with some particularly sharp falls in both value (-15.0%) and number of items (-23.9%). Precious metal timepieces also saw a marked decline (-6.0%). Products in the Other metals category dropped by a third in number of items.” Note that, while not listed in the graphs, Italy also recorded a large drop of over 16%.
All in all, while not great, I don’t think this is a huge surprise to anyone and the good news is that USA, China and Japan keep up a happy face. If one of these three starts frowning, it’d be a different story.