Switzerland Today
Greetings from Zurich!
The wonderful country of Switzerland, as you all know and love, is famed for its luxury, chocolate, mountains and high costs. But they don’t always mix very well.
The Toblerone chocolate brand has already found this out, having been forced to ditch its Swiss Made label when it moved some production to low-cost Slovakia.
Now it appears the vultures are circling over Toblerone, hoping to exploit this perceived weakness.
Chocolate fight
Toblerone, invented by Theodore Tobler and Emil Baumann in 1908 in Bern, was last month declared no longer Swiss enough to be Swiss.
And so it must ditch the Swiss flag and Matterhorn mountain symbol from its packaging. That’s the price US owner Mondelez International must pay for reducing production costs.
And now one of Toblerone’s competitors, the British Twin Peaks brand, spies a chance to grab market share.
“We believe we can exploit this opportunity to the fullest, both in the UK and overseas,” Derek Nixon, managing director of Walkers Chocolates, which owns the Twin Peaks brand, told Swiss public Broadcaster RTS.
Mondelez and Walkers Chocolates are known adversaries, having previously clashed in court over intellectual property rights (Twin Peaks has triangular chunks of chocolate mixed with nougat and hazelnuts).
The chocolate business can be tough, and not always very sweet, as other court battles prove.
The Toblerone/Twin Peaks tussle may well demonstrate the true value of the Swiss Made label.
Rising cost of breakfast
Talking of high costs, did you know the price of margarine rose 20% between March of 2022 and this year?
Cooking oil (+20%), butter (+17%), milk, cheese and eggs (+8.5%) are all more expensive than a year ago, according to price comparison platform Comparis.
Inflation in Switzerland clocked in at 2.8% last year, which is modest by the standards of many other parts of the world.
But a relatively modest rise on already high prices can have a devastating effect on some families. Not everyone is lucky enough to be a banker.
Fortunately, not all costs have behaved in the same way. Fuel prices fell by 7.4%, health services cost 3.6% less and telecommunication bills dropped by 3.4%, says Comparis.
But that still left Swiss consumers paying 3.5% more for a broad range of items in March than a year ago.
Where now for Swiss banks?
The rescue of Credit Suisse by UBS is anything but a fairytale ending for the Swiss financial centre.
A couple of weeks ago, I looked at the open questions surrounding the forced marriage of Switzerland’s two largest banks.
Since then, the media, parliament, lawyers and the federal prosecutor have all raised more questions.
Former Finance Minister Ueli Maurer says he could not trust cabinet colleagues with the details of Credit Suisse’s problems – which raises further questions about government.
I’ll be part of a SWI swissinfo.ch Let’s Talk broadcast on Thursday, April 20, (from 14.45 CET) along with economist and journalist Myret Zaki and finance professor Marc Chesney.
Are you interested in taking part in this discussion? If so, please contact me matt.allen@swissinfo.ch
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