Swiss watch exports continued their very strong growth in January 2022, which began throughout the year 2021. Boosted by Europe, they increased by 6.8% over one year.
As a reminder, the Swiss watchmaking industry had a very good year in 2021, accentuated in particular by the rebound in the luxury sector. Exports of watches increased by 31.2% year-on-year to 22.3 billion Swiss francs (around 21.3 billion euros). In a sign of remarkable results, they surpassed their pre-pandemic level and beat their previous historical record set in 2014.
For the month of January 2022, watch exports reached the value of 1.7 billion Swiss francs (1.6 billion euros).
Heterogeneous growth depending on the market
In fact, it was primarily Europe that drove export growth throughout January 2022. In particular, they increased by 20.1% compared to January 2021.
More specifically, Spain is in first place among the countries with the highest rate of exports of Swiss watches, jumping by 54% to the latter. The United Kingdom comes next, having increased by 26.1% towards this market. Finally, France was the third European country to experience a rebound in exports, with a 14.4% increase in exports to that country.
Across the Atlantic, exports to the United States continued the trend of 2021, with an increase of 37.5% over January 2022.
In a contrary dynamic, it was surprisingly in China that watch exports showed a fall of 12.2% towards that country, which “was down for the first time since the start of the Covid-19 crisis“, noted the watchmaking federation. The latter nevertheless stresses that they have remained at a high level, due to the two very good years of strong growth in exports to this market. As a reminder, China had been the only market to grow in 2020 while Swiss watch exports had fallen drastically in all other regions of the world.
In this same region, Hong Kong, one of the major markets for Swiss watchmaking, remains more or less on the same trend as China. According to the watchmaking federation, this country has shown “no sign of recovery” and “the outlook is darkening in view of its health situation“.
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Featured Photo : © Vacheron-Constantin
