Swatch boss looks to new markets for recovery

Swatch boss looks to new markets for recovery Keystone-SDA

At a press conference on Wednesday, Swatch boss Nick Hayek admitted that the company’s 2024 results were relatively low. He refused, however, to talk of a crisis, and was counting on growth markets for a recovery in 2025.

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“There are opportunities everywhere,” CEO Nick Hayek told reporters, stressing that the situation was generally “good”. He explained that consumer enthusiasm just after Covid had waned, but conceded that the company had not expected the slowdown to be so severe.

Swatch had a difficult year in 2024, with results down sharply as a result of the slowdown in China and the strength of the Swiss franc. The company’s revenues fell by 14.6% to CHF6.7 billion ($7.6 billion) and net profit plummeted to CHF219 million, four times less than the CHF890 million recorded a year earlier. Negative exchange rate effects amounted to CHF192 million.

In response to this poor performance, Swatch points above all to weak demand for all consumer goods in China, including Hong Kong and Macau. However, the group stressed that it had achieved “record sales and market share gains in the United States, Japan, India and the Middle East”, with the strongest growth for the Omega, Longines and Tissot brands.

Translated from German by DeepL/jdp

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