Wall Street Journal on trouble in Swiss watch industry

[jstan9]

I thought yesterday’s WSJ piece on the Swiss watch industry was fascinating. It’s behind a paywall, but here are some excerpts (it’s a long feature article in the Business & Finance section):

GENEVA—You’re 25 years old, bask­ing in the glow of your first big job pro­mo­tion and a hefty raise. Why not splurge on a big-ticket item?

Your fa­ther might have bought a fancy Swiss watch. But the thought doesn’t oc­cur to you—for most of your life, you’ve used your cell­phone to check the time. In­stead, you book a get­away to Costa Rica, which you doc­u­ment ex­ten-sively on In­sta­gram.

Swiss watch­mak­ing ex­ec­u-tive Jean-Claude Biver wants to change that think­ing. From his perch at lux­ury con­glom­er-ate LVMH Moët Hen­nessy Louis Vuit­ton, the 68-year-old has seen younger gen­er­a­tions drift away from his cen­turies-old in­dus­try. He is on a mis­sion to get them in­ter­ested in watches, be­fore it’s too late.

“It’s the first time we have young peo­ple not buy­ing watches,” says Mr. Biver, who leads LVMH’s watch di­vi­sion. “Time is every­where. Why should these kids buy some-thing for the wrists that tells them the same thing they get every­where?”

Ex­ec­u­tives across Switzer-land’s watch in­dus­try have been wrestling with the same ques­tion. How can they con­vince young con­sumers that me­chan­i­cal time­pieces are rel­e­vant—let alone worth the price of a car? At the same time, the tra­di­tion-bound man­u­fac­tur­ers are fend­ing off Apple Inc. and other tech com­pa­nies that are dis­rupt­ing the mar­ket with wrist gad­gets that track your work­outs and or­ga­nize your so­cial life.

And another:

The per­ils fac­ing the Swiss in­dus­try have been laid bare by a sharp down­turn start­ing in 2015. Chi­nese con­sumers, who drove a two-decade boom in the watch busi­ness, reined in their spend­ing. That ex­posed watch­mak­ers’ grow-ing dis­con­nect with clien­tele in the West. Swiss watch ex­ports glob­ally fell 13% be­tween 2014 and 2016. Last year, ex­ports rose 2.7%, but still lagged well be­hind the lux­ury sec­tor as a whole.