Watchmaking in the News.

The MBO, the management buy out of Ulysse Nardin and Girard-Perregaux.

The official change should occur in the first half of 2022 and as a reminder both brands were in the hands of Kering, the french luxury group owners of some heavy players of the fashion industry such as Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent.

But in the watch department, they only had two, or let’s say 2.5; Girard-Perregaux, including JeanRichard, a brand slightly put on the side a few years back, and Ulysse Nardin.

The Swatch Group published its 2021 figures a few days ago with an annual turnover CHF 7.3 billon, up 30.7 % compared to 2020, and a profitability of almost CHF 1 billion compared to CHF 52 million a year before.

Some financial medias mentioned that 75% of its profits were made by three brands; Omega, Longines and Tissot.

And we should highlight the strong return of Tissot, probably the PRX collection helped and in their price segment, well this is quite an achievement when you’re competing against smart watches in particular.

And these numbers also highlight the fact that the Swatch Group knows to handle large volume brands, because this unfortunately can’t be said about their luxury brands; Breguet, Harry Winston, Jaquet Droz and Blancpain, though it seems this last one is not doing as bad.

Richemont also published some numbers, though their fiscal year ends at the end March.

But nonetheless Q3 of 2021 saw a 35% jump of its consolidated turnover, but we know that this is mainly driven by the jewellry activity of Cartier and Van Cleef & Arpels.

So if we compare the first nine months of their turnover between 2021 and 2020, well that’s an increase of roughly 50%, but it is fair to say that luxury as a whole enjoyed a solid year and how best to illustrate this with no nothing less than the world’s number one group, LVMH, which did a consolidated turnover of 64 Billion Euros, +44% over one year and 12 Billion profit and jewellry and watches representing almost 9 Billion of this turnover, but as with the Richemont group, the watchmaking division represents a small portion of these 9 Billions.

And if you really want to put things into perspective, then you simply have to take Apple’s fourth quarter sales reaching 124 Billion dollars.

2022 marks the 50th anniversary of an absolute icon and only a few days ago was released a series of new Royal Oaks but we already know more will come during the year.

This famous watch was originally designed by Gerald Genta and among these releases, AP had to pay tribute to the very first one, the so-called “Jumbo” as it was perceived as being huge 50 years ago, yes time changes.

Interesting to mention that the “AP” logo was introduced in 1972 on the dial of this very first Royal Oak Jumbo.

Before it simply did not exist and the main reason for its creation was that the name Audemars Piguet was difficult to pronounce in some languages, asian languages in particular.