Should you still wish to part with SFr14,000 ($16,800)—the average retail price of a Rolex—you will have to join a waiting list. BuyING a Rolex is an odd experience.
Choose nearly any model on display at one of the Swiss watchmaker’s authorised dealers and you will be told that, unfortunately, it is unavailable at this time.
Thousands do so every day. For much of the Swiss watch industry, the clock is ticking. Sales of quartz timepieces, which use electronic rather than mechanical movements, have been hit particularly hard by the rise of smart watches, most of which are made in Asia. But for Rolex and a few other luxury watchmakers, times are better than ever. Even as the volume of exports has tumbled, their value has continued to rise. All bar Omega have been gaining share. The very top end has been especially strong. That partly reflects rising precious-metals prices, but also the rude financial health of the very rich and their demand for something special. Many brands invested in new materials and more sophisticated movements to differentiate themselves. In the casing of its Wild One Meteorite Special Edition, a luxury sports watch, Norqain used a high-performance carbon-fibre composite; the dial was cut from an iron meteorite from Sweden. The upmarket switch has not been good for Swatch, the largest listed Swiss watchmaker. Swatch is credited with saving the industry in the 1980s, when its snazzy plastic quartz watches held their own against cheap Asian alternatives. These days it is struggling. It maintains a bloated production infrastructure. It now makes just 4m, but has not closed any of those sites. Rolex remains king of the ring. Its sales are three times those of second-ranked Cartier. It is time that is scarce.
Rolex sold almost 1.2m watches last year, bringing in revenue of more than SFr11bn, up from around SFr8bn in the early 2020s, thanks to higher prices (volume barely increased). Over the past decade the volume of exports (which make up 95% of sales) has fallen by half (see chart). In August it was 9.1% higher than a year earlier, the fourth year-on-year rise in as many months. Switzerland is home to around 450 brands. But last year just five of the poshest—Rolex, Cartier, Patek Philippe, Omega and Audemars Piguet—captured 60% of revenue. In 2025 watches costing more than SFr50,000 accounted for 37% of the value of Swiss watch exports, up from 33.5% in 2024. The firm made only 300 of them. Its share price is more than 40% lower than it was in early 2023, and nearly 70% below its peak in late 2013. Last year its net profit plunged by almost 90%. Swatch once made up to 15m watches a year in 150 Swiss factories. It is owned by the Hans Wilsdorf Foundation, a charitable trust set up in 1945 by the firm’s childless founder, which channels profits back into research and development and supports philanthropic causes in the canton of Geneva.
“The pandemic and the subsequent years have made the industry more adventurous,” says Ben Küffer, chief executive of Norqain, a Swiss family-owned firm whose watches sell for an average of SFr4,500. It largely missed the “premiumisation” wave, says Jean-Philippe Bertschy of Vontobel, a bank (Swatch owns Omega and other fancy brands, but their results have been mixed). Rolex says the scarcity of its wares is not deliberate policy, but the result of its focus on craftsmanship. To track the trends shaping commerce, industry and technology,sign up to “ The Bottom Line ”, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter on global business.
