AP's annual production

[Speed]

I know the figure of 20,000 watches a year has been bandied about for AP. A far cry lower than the ~ 800/900K produced by Rolex.

On the now discontinued 15300 and current 15400...anyone have a SWAG at how many of these are produced per year by AP?

Apologies if this has been asked before.

[singe89]

32,000 according to their website

http://www.audemarspiguet.com/en/careers

[bayerische]

30 times less than Rolex.

[Speed]

Thanks Jim. Can't dispute that source. Didn't think a family-owned co would publish that stat.

Much appreciated.

Now...wonder how many of that # consisted of (roughly that is) 15300's or now 15,400's

[cdnyc]

My guess would be about 20%. Maybe 40% total ROs, 40% Offshores, 20% Millenary/JA/etc.?? Totally guesses.

[Speed]

Cory, Jim validated the number of 32K directly from APs website.

I'm curious what % of this number represent the lower priced Royal Oak 15300 / 15400

[Watchcentric]

Very interesting topic.

Here's my take : AP 15300's have been produced between 2005 and 2011, so roughly 6 years.

If I'm not mistaken than the serial nr on the back (not the case number) was given sequentially to each 15300. So if we find the (approximate) last serial number of a 15300, we can divide by 6 and know how many were produced each year.

I'm not sure if this makes sense, so please correct me if I'm wrong.

I'll give it a shot : the highest serial nr I have seen on a 15300 is 11682. So if we divide by 6 this means roughly 2000 AP15300's were produced each year.

This is only 6% of the annual production, but this doesn't feel awfully wrong with all the different models out there.

Anyone know of a higher serial number for a 15300 ??

[mdtddd2007]

Originally Posted by singe89

32,000 according to their website

http://www.audemarspiguet.com/en/careers

[bardamu]

There's a statistical method one can use to estimate the size of a population from a sample where true serial numbers (i.e., sequentially assigned based on production) are available. This Wikipedia article recounts a similar problem:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem

I looked around the web and found 10 SS 15300 serials, the highest of which was 16063. The Bayesian formula returns total production of around 18.1k ± 2.3k.

For a number of reasons this approach isn't perfect, but I think it's very possible that more than 20k were produced altogether.

[Speed]

Hmm. Interesting models for making an educated guess. Thanks!

[Watchcentric]

Thanks for the higher serial nr.

With my simple method above this gives an annnual production of the 15300 of 2677 watches, which is 8.4% of the annual AP production.

Any higher serial numbers out there?

And can someone confirm that the serial nrs are applied per (sub)model. I know that some people claim that all Royal Oaks are serially numbered (so also the 15202 and all the RO sub-39mm models would be included in that case; Offshores would be different serial nrs).

Thanks!

[Dickson Lim]

Originally Posted by bardamu

There's a statistical method one can use to estimate the size of a population from a sample where true serial numbers (i.e., sequentially assigned based on production) are available. This Wikipedia article recounts a similar problem:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem

I looked around the web and found 10 SS 15300 serials, the highest of which was 16063. The Bayesian formula returns total production of around 18.1k ± 2.3k.

For a number of reasons this approach isn't perfect, but I think it's very possible that more than 20k were produced altogether.

Now that's one heck of serious estimation method!

[AK797]

This is too much maths for a luxury watch thread.

[kilyung]

Originally Posted by singe89

32,000 according to their website

http://www.audemarspiguet.com/en/careers

Fun reading (and day dreaming) about the posted jobs.