The Fourth Wheel, Issue 112

Gossip and comment on the LVMH and Richemont CEO changes, plus the new TAG Heuer, Piaget and Lederer watches that were just 'announced' by the GPHG

Hello and welcome back to The Fourth Wheel, the weekly watch newsletter that - in a major departure from current horological trends - is not announcing any management changes this week, this month or even this year. The shareholders are content, the board is energised, the workforce is absolutely motoring and the CEO is nothing short of visionary. Ahem. Is this what it feels like to be a dictator? Without further ado… I bring you comment on all the recent comings and goings, plus some exclusive leaks of upcoming watches courtesy of the GPHG. Enjoy!

---

---

The Fourth Wheel is a reader-supported publication with no advertising, sponsorship or commercial partnerships to influence its content. It is made possible by the generous support of its readers: if you think watch journalism could do with a voice that exists outside of the usual media dynamic, please consider taking out a paid subscription. You can start with a free trial!

Here’s a little taste of what you might have missed recently:

Ask Me Anything Vol. 11
Can Switzerland Ever Embrace Quartz?
World Exclusive: Horological Dicktionary On The Record
Louis Vuitton Brings Back The Classic Round Watch
Review: The Schofield Obscura

---

First, some thoughts on the numerous CEO and executive changes over the last couple of weeks.

At Richemont, the priorities are clear: as long as Cartier and Van Cleef & Arpels have the right people in charge, things will be ok. (Van Cleef is the most profitable entity in the group, while Cartier provides almost half of the group’s revenue). It was notable that the appointments which were announced - Louis Ferla from Vacheron to Cartier; Nicolas Bos from VC&A to Group CEO; Catherine Renier to VC&A - did not include any mention of permanently backfilling the roles at Vacheron Constantin and Jaeger-LeCoultre, two of the most prestigious names in watchmaking. The press release said that Philippe Hermann, currently CFO at JLC will take the job on an interim basis, but it’s my understanding that Jean-Marc Pontroué is the frontrunner to take the CEO role at Jaeger-LeCoultre, while others have reported that Laurent Perves, currently chief commercial officer at VC, will step into Ferla’s old shoes at least for the interim.

Also notable was the silence around Jerome Lambert’s move from Group CEO back to COO, a role he held for a year before being given the CEO job in 2018. Bos’s position is somewhat vaguely described as ‘directly and indirectly oversee all the Maisons, functions and regions, notably the Jewellery Maisons, Finance and Human Resources’ - Lambert’s old job description specifically put him in charge of what Richemont calls its Specialist Watchmaking Maisons, i.e. the pure watch brands. For now, they seem to be remaining under the control of Emmanuel Perrin, who has kept his head down in that job for a while now. But it is generally being inferred by other journalists that Bos’ new role carries more responsibility than the one Lambert has vacated - as certain brand CEOs, including Bos himself, never reported into Lambert in the first place. Now Lambert will report into Bos, which must feel like a real leapfrogging. When he ascended to the Richemont CEO position in 2018 it was widely felt that Lambert had succeeded in elbowing out his rivals and cementing his place as the preeminent executive beneath Johann Rupert (remember Georges Kern left Richemont in 2017 to take over at Breitling, having very briefly been given the role of Group Head of Watchmaking, Marketing and Digital). Lambert was described as ‘first among equals’ in 2018. Now he’s back to being one of them.

Finding good new executives can be difficult when the market isn’t as buoyant as it was only a couple of years ago, as LVMH has obviously realised. Rumours of Ricardo Guadalupe’s retirement have been circulating for a while; he has worked for Hublot since before it was acquired by LVMH, was hired by Jean-Claude Biver - once the king, and kingmaker, of watches within the group, but no longer - and the word on the street is that Hublot, a brand whose identity is so firmly tied to youth and disruption, could use some fresh blood at the helm. My sources tell me that LVMH tapped up Julien Tornare after a long and fruitless external search for a possible replacement; certainly you don’t need any kind of special insight to realise that yanking Tornare out of the hot seat at TAG Heuer seven months after he started wasn’t part of the plan.

Whether the move to Hublot will be spun as a promotion remains to be seen; you might look at the Morgan Stanley / LuxeConsult rankings and think that Hublot, which MS ranks 12th in the industry, is a bigger prize than TAG Heuer (15th). But I’m told that the truth is somewhat different, with consecutive years of double-digit decline at Hublot set against much more positive progress at TAG Heuer. Purely as an outsider looking in, I’d say running TAG Heuer is a more prestigious position - certainly the brand is more historic, and more universally admired.

There’s also the small matter of the rumoured Formula 1 sponsorship contract. This story has been bugging me, because dozens of websites are reporting it as true, most of them purely basing that on Coronet’s one article¹. However… a couple of people I know in the motoring world believe the story to be true, hearing things from the F1 side, and the more I turn the idea over, the more it seems to add up. Rolex has been the sport’s ‘timekeeping’ sponsor since 2013, so you can imagine whatever period was agreed to - ten years, you might imagine, although we’re past that - might well be coming to a close. The idea of a brand like Rolex being beaten on a financial footing is an odd one for watch geeks, but if LVMH is looking to bring not just TAG Heuer for timing, but a whole roster of other brands - drinks, luggage, hospitality, you name it - then you can easily imagine the clout far outweighing the $50m-$75m that Rolex allegedly spends. I wouldn’t be surprised if it surpassed the $150m figure being bandied about.

The man set to reap the benefits of this new deal - if indeed it is announced - for TAG Heuer will be Antoine Pin, formerly head of watchmaking at Bulgari. I’ve met Pin a few times, and he seems like a smart guy, but this is a big step up. He worked for TAG Heuer previously, under Jean-Christophe Babin, who now runs Bulgari; that was the era of record-breaking Mikro-chronographs, the Monaco V4, and TAG Heuer’s diversion into eyewear, mobile phones and even - I didn’t know about this until this week - a co-branded Tesla Roadster concept car, unveiled at the 2010 Geneva Motor Show.

I’m not saying this is what awaits the TAG Heuer team however, not at all. And I think headlines like Bloomberg’s, which tie TAG Heuer’s ‘third CEO in the space of a year’ to downward trends across the industry, are a tiny bit unfair; it’s not TAG Heuer’s fault that Tornare’s leaving and he hasn’t been there long enough to really take the blame - or the credit - for this year’s results.

Taking Pin’s place at Bulgari is Johnathan Brinbaum, who moves across from Bulgari’s perfume division. Meanwhile Jean-Christophe Babin, whose impending retirement has been industry gossip longer than that of Mr Guadalupe’s, is going nowhere for the time being, despite rumours to the contrary.

---

Let us turn our attention now to the GPHG awards, which just yesterday (Thursday 18th July, if you’re catching up at your leisure) published the longlist of entrants for this year’s awards.