Issue 142: Winners & Losers Of The Morgan Stanley/LuxeConsult 2025 Report
Rolex: great. Cartier: great. Pretty much everyone else: Panic!
Hello and welcome back to The Fourth Wheel, the weekly watch newsletter that is no longer moonlighting as a trashy romance writer (see below if you have no idea what I’m talking about) and is back to good old serious analysis. There will be numbers! There will be graphs! There will not be a lot of good news! Sorry, spoiler alert. This issue is one attempt - I’m sure there will be more - to answer what I think is the question on everyone’s mind right now: what the hell is actually going on? There are a lot of mixed signals: data from a year ago (mostly negative, can’t be ignored) merges with the constant chatter of new releases (forcibly positive, everybody keep grinning, nobody look down) and the drip, drip of gossip and drama emerging from Switzerland itself (everyone try to stay calm, have another drink and look the other way). At any one time you can see past, present and future unfolding at different speeds - we are slowly learning about what has happened, trying to make sense of what is happening, and hearing worrying signs about what’s to come. This week: what happened in 2024, at least according to LuxeConsult and Morgan Stanley. Enjoy…!
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Here’s a little taste of what you might have missed recently:
In Brief
Hodinkee puts one in the top corner
Back once again with the critical opinions
I realised a week or two ago that I hadn’t read Hodinkee in a while. For someone in my position, it was quite a double-take. I’ve read Hodinkee probably almost daily for more than a decade. Suddenly I hadn’t logged on for a while and didn’t even notice.
Despite Ben’s claim last year that following the Watches of Switzerland buyout, Hodinkee would be back to doing the kind of things only Hodinkee can, I had a poke around and it all seemed… fine. Big projects take time to come together, I realise that, but the regular story mix looked a little flat. Could you take the masthead away and know for definite you were reading Hodinkee and not another watch site? Not sure.
But one story stuck out this week: Ben Clymer himself loading up a fresh clip and spraying bullets of personal opinion at the industry. I enjoyed it, I agreed with most of it, and evidently a lot of readers did too. More of this please.
In particular, his gripes about chronometers that aren’t certified, and Sellita movements that are lazily re-named with a custom rotor, landed right in the middle of the bullseye. Now, a true cynic might say that one article like this doesn’t change the entire website, and you might even think that taking aim at a few relatively easy targets is a good way to show backbone without taking too many risks - but I say credit where it’s due, and look forward to reading more opinionated pieces in the future. Selfishly, because a rising tide lifts all boats where this is concerned, but also because it’s just more fun.
Want me to do a “top gripes” list?1
Good News For A Few, Bad News For Everyone Else
My thoughts and analysis on the 2025 LuxeConsult/Morgan Stanley watch report
The annual publication of this report has become a fixture in the watch media calendar, and it has further established Oliver Muller, its primary author, as a respected commentator on the industry. CEOs (and privately, brand insiders) will take issue with his estimated numbers, but he defends them robustly and more to the point, urges anyone to correct him on the record. Never going to happen - but if you work for a brand, and you think these numbers are off, let me know! All anonymous of course.
So we take these reports as, if not gospel, then the best we have; and if nothing else, we should be able to expect them to be consistent year-on-year.2
I should begin by saying that this year, the full report is yet to be publicly available. In fact, it never is; but usually Oliver Muller would write an in-depth article for SJX (in years gone by) or Revolution (now) outlining the full findings. That is also yet to appear; all we have to go on are a few of the top-line charts. Monochrome did a first pass at the headlines and for ease of reference I would suggest you open this in a new tab just so you’ve got the charts to look at. I could just copy paste them in here but LuxeConsult/Morgan Stanley specifically ask that you don’t do that.
The lack of the whole report doesn’t mean we don’t have plenty of data to look at - and having scoured it, I’ve seen a few fascinating details that I don’t think have been widely picked up elsewhere.
These are my takeaways from this year’s report:
It Wasn’t A Great Year To Be A Watch Brand…
According to LuxeConsult’s charts (from now on, I’ll stop saying that - this is all from their charts unless otherwise noted), the total turnover of the top 50 Swiss watch brands fell from CHF 36.1bn to CHF 35.3bn year on year - a 2.4 per cent decrease. The market is shrinking. This matches the trend noted by the FH, which reported that the export market declined by 2.8 per cent in 2024 yoy. (So arguably, Switzerland itself is outperforming the market globally, although we are comparing two sets of data here.)
Volume sales fell from an estimated 15.9m to 13.3m - so with volume falling faster than value, we can obviously conclude that average prices have risen. (Note; the FH remarked that 2024’s exports of 15.3m watches were “historically low”. That’s a phrase they’re going to have to have on standby for most of 2025). The rise in prices can be mistaken for a healthy sign - people are spending so much money on watches! - but this is not good news, as I’ll return to later.
The top ten brands by turnover are unchanged, and that order is:
Rolex
Cartier
Omega
Audemars Piguet
Patek Philippe
Richard Mille
Longines
Vacheron Constantin
Breitling
Tissot
Even within this elite club, it’s not all good news. Vacheron Constantin dropped out of the billionaire set, its turnover shrinking from CHF 1.1bn to CHF 942m. In fact, only Rolex, Cartier, AP, Patek and RM recorded increased turnover in the top ten, and those were small gains - in some cases less than 1 per cent. LC/MS provides a list of the top 50 Swiss brands, and of those only 12 were said to have increased turnover3.
Quick side note: speaking of the FH figures, the latest monthly report might be taken for better news, finding as it does that exports for January were up 4.1 per cent. Don’t be fooled. That’s a month-on-month increase, and it barely registers against the wider trend of year-on-year decline. We are in the fifth consecutive month of negative y/o/y performance, as illustrated by this chart. In fact, we’re very close (this month’s very slight uptick notwithstanding) to the oft-cited (and oft-debated) definition of a recession: two consecutive quarters of negative growth.
The Biggest Losers
There are a number of ways to spin this. LC/MS call out Swatch Group as a net donor of market share, losing 200bps4. Muller notes that it was a bad year for the big groups overall, with Richemont’s specialist watchmakers (i.e. not Cartier, Van Cleef or Montblanc) losing market share. LVMH also saw most of its brands fall in terms of turnover. Its market share is the lowest of the major conglomerates, and I’ll come back to LVMH in particular at the end.
There were other individual tales of woe. Perhaps most surprising to the watch geek audience is Tudor’s drop.
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