How many High-end watch Switzerland produces each year
nowadays!??
Imagine an established, Swiss watch brand, located in Geneva
or the Vallée de Joux. This watchmaker has done well and diversified with good
marketing network now makes 40,000 mid- to high-end watches a year. (Swiss bank
Vontobel recently estimated in that Audemars Piguet makes 40,000 watches a
year; Breguet, 32,000; Jaeger-LeCoultre, 75,000; Roger Dubuis with 8,000, while
the number at Patek Philippe is 50,000.)
Of the 40,000 watches made by the imaginary watch company,
say 20 percent are complications such as chronographs and annual calendars, but
quarter of the complications output is the high-end stuff, minute repeaters,
tourbillons and the like; watches with six figure price tags. So this company
makes 2000 high-end complications a year. Assume a third, or 500, of those are
tourbillons.
Over a decade, that would mean 20,000 high-end complications
produced, 5000 of them tourbillons
by a single hypothetical company.
With 20 companies, a decade’s worth of production is 400,000
high complications, and 100,000 tourbillons.
High complications typically starting at US$100,000, being a
mere millionaire is insufficient to afford one. Only ultra high net worth
individuals – those fortunate individuals with over US$30m to their name – can
reasonably afford such watches. Wealth-X, a research firm specializing in rich people,
estimated in early 2015 that there are just over 211,000 ultra high net worth
individuals around the world.
Even if every UHNW individual on the planet bought a
high-end complication over the course of a decade, there will still leftover watches.
So the answer to the question in the title is obviously yes.
That’s why modern complicated watches are now faring poorly in the secondary
market, as evidenced by recent auction results.
What is a collector to do?
A collector should, therefore, pursue truly rare watches.
Vintage watches are often the suggestion, since their supply is by definition
limited. However, the vintage watch market is frothy and fraught with danger,
so prudence and specialized knowledge is required.
It never not too late to seek genuinely rare watches.
HK Snob
