SDC Weekly 92; 2025 Consumer Trends; Where the Watch World Is Headed
Swiss Watch Industry (FHS) - March Update, Hermès vs LVMH, The Limited Edition Turns 10, On Watches & Happiness
🚨 Welcome back!
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Estimated reading time: ~30 mins
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📉 Swiss Watch Industry - March Update
The Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry (FHS) March 2025 report appears to offer a glimmer of hope given exports have grown 1.5% compared to March 2024. But that’s not the full story. Yes, this marks a return to positive territory after several challenging months, but as we saw in the MS report last week, the first quarter still ended with a slight decline of 1.1% (they don’t align on percentages with the MS report).
Total exports: 2.13 billion Swiss francs (+1.5% year-over-year)
Unit decline continues: Despite value growth, the total number of watches exported fell by 4.8% (55,000 fewer watches)
Material breakdown: Steel watches led growth (+5.0% in value); precious metals (+1.9%) and bimetallic watches (+1.0%) also showed some improvement
Price segments: Watches priced above 500 CHF grew by 1.9%, but the 200-500 CHF segment declined severely (-17.5%)
The market is still quite polarised and you can clearly see the dramatic differences by region:
USA: Extraordinary growth of 13.7% - now representing nearly a fifth of all Swiss watch exports
United Kingdom: Impressive growth of 10.6%, securing third position in the market ranking
Japan: Modest growth at 1.1%
China & Hong Kong: Both markets continue to struggle (-11.5% and -11.3% respectively) but there’s more to this in the next section.
Hope From China
It turns out, there is a glimmer of hope coming out of the Chinese market after their prolonged slump. Watch and jewellery retail sales in China seem to have risen by 5.4% year-on-year in January and February 2025, and reached a record high of CNY 75.5 billion. For context, this is the strongest increase since December 2023 and marks the end of nine consecutive months of decline.