Has the Swiss watch given up on beginners?

Twenty years ago, a teenager’s first watch stood a good chance of being Swiss. A Tissot given for exam results, a colourful Swatch swapped with the mood, an entry-level Certina inherited from an uncle. It was not luxury, it was a way in. You started there, and some of those beginners came back fifteen years later towards more serious mechanics. Today that same teenager almost always wears the same thing on the wrist, and it is no longer watchmaking as Biel or Le Locle understood the word. It is an Apple Watch.

That shift tells of an industrial decision taken over a decade and a half. Switzerland climbed the range one step at a time, until it had deserted the first step. The question that closes this series is easy to ask and fearsome to settle: in giving up on beginners, did Swiss watchmaking saw off the branch its future clientele was sitting on?

The collapse in volumes

Let us start with the least disputable data, because it rests on no estimate. The export statistics of the Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry count units clearing customs, ex-factory. These are facts, not sellers’ projections. And those facts say something plain: the number of Swiss watches exported has collapsed. In the order of 44 per cent below 2008, around 51 per cent below the 2011 peak. In volume, the Swiss industry today ships roughly one watch for every two at its peak.

Two measures that are constantly confused have to be separated here. Volume is the number of pieces. Value is the money banked. And exported value kept rising while the units melted away. Translation: Switzerland sells far fewer watches, but each one costs a great deal more. That gulf is no accident, it is the strategy. The first part of this series showed it from the profit side, the second from the group side. This third one takes it from the bottom of the range, where the drop is sharpest.

The fuel of that fall has a name: cheap quartz. The entry-level battery watch, the one that filled the windows of town-centre jewellers, has all but disappeared from Swiss flows. It earned almost nothing per piece and occupied capacity the brands preferred to redeploy upwards. Nobody announced its abandonment. It simply emptied out, budget line after budget line.

The first step left to others

A market hates a vacuum. The step Switzerland left, others took. At the top of world volume, the Apple Watch crushes everything: market estimates reported by Morgan Stanley put it at around 85 million units a year, when the entire Swiss industry exported only 15.3 million in 2024, its lowest on record. Apple’s figure remains an estimate, not customs data, and the brand does not confirm it; Switzerland’s comes from the Federation’s customs statistics. The order of magnitude of the shift is not open to argument. For a whole generation, the first watch on the wrist is now a connected object.

Just below, on the ground of accessible mechanics and quality quartz, the Japanese hold the position Switzerland deserted. Seiko and Citizen have occupied that price zone for ever, and far from suffering there they prosper. Seiko shows a watch division growing at a double-digit rate and now weighing beyond a billion dollars, carried by Grand Seiko’s breakthrough in the United States. The detail of the amounts varies from one financial year to the next, but the direction is constant: while Switzerland climbed, the Japanese kept the base and made it pay.

Why is this a strategic problem and not merely lost revenue on low-margin products? Because of what is called the acquisition funnel. The idea is commonplace in retail: you capture a young or less wealthy customer with an entry product, you build loyalty, you move them up-market over the years and the income. The beginner who bought a cheap Swiss watch was not a bad customer, they were a future good one. In leaving them to Apple, to Seiko, to Citizen, Swiss watchmaking is not losing a 300-franc sale. It is losing the relationship that, ten or twenty years later, might have led to mechanics at 5,000.

February’s photograph: a K-shaped market

That is the setting Morgan Stanley’s Swiss Watcher report described last February, from estimated retail sales data for 2025. A reminder of the nature of these figures: they are sell-side estimates, produced by financial analysts with LuxeConsult, from the retail market. Useful for reading trends, they are no substitute for the Federation’s customs facts.

Their diagnosis came down to one letter: the K-shaped market. Two branches diverging from the same point. Upwards, a handful of very expensive brands and segments capturing most of the growth; according to Morgan Stanley, watches above 50,000 francs concentrate a disproportionate share of the market’s advance. Downwards, a long tail of players withering. The middle hollows out, the extremes move apart. On that photograph, the Swiss entry level was a patient in palliative care.

The 2026 film contradicts the photograph

Then the facts arrived, and they do not fit the story. The Federation’s export figures for the first half of 2026 show the segment given up for dead posting the strongest growth of the year. Careful with the wording, because it is a trap. This is not about watches under 500 francs in general, nor about growth in value. It is a rise in the number of units, in the order of 23.8 per cent, in mechanical watches whose ex-factory price is below 500 francs, meaning roughly under 1,250 francs in the shop. Growth in volume, on small mechanics, on customs facts.

At the same time, another segment is falling back. Watches with an export price between 500 and 3,000 francs lose around 5.7 per cent in value over the half-year. The middle of the range goes on emptying while the two ends hold: small mechanics boost the units, the very top end holds the value. The polarisation February’s photograph described is not reversing, it is shifting. The K is not closing, its lower branch is coming back to life.

Should this be read as the great return of Swiss watchmaking to its base? Caution. A volume rebound at low prices is not the same thing as a strategic reinvestment in the entry level. It may be a mechanical effect: a few brands pushing affordable mechanics to inflate their unit figures, a price movement rather than a return of conviction. The upturn is real. What it announces is not yet.

What this reveals

Three parts, the same fracture read from three angles. Profit concentrating on a handful of players while the mass falls back. A whole group coming to depend on the rebound of a single one of its brands. And a customer base left to empty for fifteen years, before a single half-year saw it abruptly take off again. At every floor, the same movement: Switzerland gains by climbing, and runs the risk of cutting itself off from what fed it from below.

There remains the question this series has no right to settle on your behalf. The photograph Morgan Stanley took in February showed a moribund entry level. The film of the 2026 exports shows it running. So which one was seeing straight? Perhaps February photographed a low point already passed, the trough of a cycle before the first step repopulates for good. Perhaps 2026 offers only a statistical reprieve, a surge of cheap volume before the structural decline resumes its course. Both readings hold with the same figures. The only certainty is that an industry that has spent fifteen years climbing will soon have to decide whether it still wants anyone to start with it.

Sources: Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry, export statistics 2008-2026 and statement on exports at mid-2026, 21 July 2026
Morgan Stanley and LuxeConsult, Swiss Watcher report, February 2026 (retail estimates)
Seiko Group Corporation, consolidated financial results (investor relations).