Morgan Stanley/LuxeConsult - Ninth Annual Swiss Watcher 2025/2026
The Swiss watch industry's middle class is disappearing. A dive into the 2026 Morgan Stanley report, from Omega's fall to #5 to the independent brands punching above their weight.
👋 Well hello, degenerates!
It is that time of year again; the watch world’s version of an earnings call, but with unnecessarily long PDF files and a fair bit of celebrating “doing alright despite the tough market” (unless you work for the Swatch Group lol!).
Morgan Stanley and LuxeConsult have published their Ninth Annual Swiss Watcher, which covers the story of Swiss watches in 2025. Note: I use “2025/2026” for my own tracking - i.e. “analysis of 2025, published in 2026”
If you read SDC’s coverage of the 2024/2025 report last year, the theme was “value over volume.” 2025 was the year when the industry decided volume was for peasants, and doubled down on the previous bet. This report has been floating around various WhatsApp groups, so I will cover it at a macro level and you can get into the weeds by yourself1.
Estimated Reading Time ~20 minutes
Executive summary
Morgan Stanley and LuxeConsult’s Ninth Annual Swiss Watcher report covers the 2025 calendar year. The Swiss watch market contracted for the second consecutive year (-1.7% in export value), and volumes hit a multi-decade low of 14.6 million units; this is roughly half the 2011 peak. Revenue held up because the industry continued an shift toward premium pricing - watches above CHF 50,000 retail accounted for over a third of export value and 89% of all growth, despite representing just 1.4% of units shipped.
The major headline is that Omega fell to #5 by turnover, overtaken by AP and Patek. Rolex crossed CHF 11 billion in wholesale sales and now exceeds Apple Watch revenues at retail level. The four largest privately owned brands (Rolex, Patek, AP, Richard Mille) captured roughly 76% of the industry’s total profit pool.
Swatch Group was the biggest market share loser for the sixth consecutive year, shedding another 220 basis points. Longines dropped below CHF 1 billion for the first time in over a decade and may now be loss-making. Cartier was the only listed-brand outlier, growing +10% to CHF 3.5 billion. Christopher Ward and MB&F both entered the Top 50 for the first time.
In this post, we’ll break down major brand performance with charts and a full comparative data table, we will cover the Grand Seiko threat, the pricing pressure from tariffs and currency moves, what Van Cleef & Arpels’ surge means for the future of watch design, and what all of this might mean for you as a collector.