In 2014, just before the Apple Watch launched, Jean-Claude Biver — then the head of TAG Heuer and one of the most respected figures in Swiss watchmaking — was asked what he thought of the upcoming device.
He said it had “no sex appeal.” He said it looked like something “designed by a student in their first trimester at design school.” He was, by most accounts in the Swiss industry, not alone in his assessment.
Eleven years later, the data tells a more complicated story than anyone in Geneva would have predicted at the time. Apple did win. But the Swiss didn’t lose the way most people assume — and what’s actually happened to the watch market is more interesting than either side anticipated.
The volume war Apple won decisively
By 2023, Apple was shipping roughly 37 million Apple Watches per year, while the entire Swiss watch industry exported about 16.9 million units combined. Every Swiss brand. Rolex, Omega, Tag Heuer, Patek Philippe, Longines, Tissot, Swatch — all of them put together — moved less than half the units Apple did in a single year.
This isn’t a recent phenomenon. Apple overtook the entire Swiss industry on volume back in 2017, and the gap has been widening ever since. According to CNBC, by 2019 Apple was already outshipping Swiss exports by nearly 50%.
If you measure watchmaking the way you’d measure car manufacturing — by units rolling off the line — Apple is by far the largest watchmaker in human history. Nothing in Swiss watchmaking comes close. The Swatch Group, which owns Tissot, Longines and a dozen other brands, accounts for roughly 70% of total Swiss watch volume on its own — and it still doesn’t move a third of what Apple does.
So on the metric Silicon Valley always cares about — units shipped — the story is over. Apple won. The Swiss don’t even make the podium.
The revenue story almost nobody noticed
Here’s where it gets interesting.
The Apple Watch generates roughly $17-20 billion in revenue per year. That sounds like a lot — and it is. But the total Swiss watch industry generates around $27 billion in annual exports alone, with billions more in domestic sales. By revenue, the Swiss never lost their lead in the first place.
And it gets sharper. In February 2024, Morgan Stanley and LuxeConsult published their annual Swiss watch report, and one prediction stopped a lot of people in their tracks: Rolex alone was on track to overtake the Apple Watch by revenue.
Not the Swiss industry. Just Rolex. A single watch brand that produces, by some estimates, around a million watches a year — about a fortieth of what Apple ships.
How? Pricing. The average Apple Watch sells for roughly $500. The average Rolex sells for closer to $14,000. Rolex has spent the last decade quietly raising prices, shifting its core lineup toward gold and platinum models, and watching the secondary market do most of its marketing for free. By 2023, Rolex revenue had grown to roughly $10.1 billion, with the trajectory pointing sharply upward.
Apple’s growth on the watch line, meanwhile, has slowed considerably. The category is mature. Replacement cycles are stretching. The early years of explosive growth are over.
What the Swiss actually figured out
The temptation in 2015 was to read the Apple Watch as a wristwatch competitor. The Swiss industry, after some panicked years, eventually figured out it wasn’t — at least not in the way Apple intended.
The Apple Watch competed for wrist space. It competed for the entry-level mass market, the people who would have bought a $200 Tissot or a $400 Hamilton or no watch at all. That’s exactly where Swiss volume bled out. Mid-tier Swiss brands like Tissot and Tag Heuer have struggled. Swatch’s volume business has shrunk meaningfully.
What survived — and in fact thrived — was the luxury end. The customer buying a $30,000 Patek Philippe Nautilus or a $15,000 Rolex Daytona was never going to wear an Apple Watch instead. Different product. Different reason for owning it. Different status entirely.
So the Swiss industry, after years of strategic flailing, eventually retreated to the only ground it could defend: the high end. And the high end, it turns out, is enormously profitable. The Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry reports that since 2020, watches priced over CHF 3,000 (about $3,400) have accounted for the vast majority of revenue growth, while sub-CHF 500 watches have declined steadily.
In other words: the Swiss didn’t try to beat Apple. They ceded the volume market and consolidated upmarket. It looks, in hindsight, like the only strategy that could have worked.
The shape of the market now
The watch market today isn’t one market. It’s two.
There’s the wearable technology market — smartwatches, fitness trackers, health monitors — which Apple dominates and which generates large revenue at low margins per unit. This market is plateauing as smartwatches become commoditised commodities. Apple’s still the leader, but Samsung, Garmin, and Chinese brands like Xiaomi and Huawei have eaten into the edges.
Then there’s the luxury mechanical watch market, which has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with status, craftsmanship, and investment value. This market is booming. Rolex waiting lists are longer than ever. Patek Philippe and Audemars Piguet allocate watches like wineries allocate first-growth bottles. Secondhand prices for desirable references have, in many cases, doubled or tripled over the past decade.
These two markets do not really compete with each other anymore. They occupy the same wrist space, technically, but they sell on entirely different propositions. Apple sells convenience and health. Rolex sells permanence and prestige.
What was actually lost — and by whom
The losers in this story aren’t really the Swiss. They’re the middle of the Swiss market. The $500-$2,000 mechanical-watch segment that used to be Tissot and Hamilton’s stronghold has largely been consumed by Apple Watches, and that segment isn’t coming back.
But the Swiss industry overall? It’s healthier than it’s been in twenty years on revenue, even as it ships fewer units than at almost any point in modern history. Rolex is closing in on Apple by revenue. Patek and Audemars Piguet are printing money. The high end has, against considerable odds, held.
So when people talk about the Apple Watch “winning” the watch market, the honest answer is more like: Apple won the part of the market that cared about utility, and the Swiss kept the part that cared about meaning. Both sides got something. Neither side, it turns out, was paying attention to the same scoreboard.
Tim Cook is famously photographed wearing nothing but Apple Watches.
The CEOs across the street from him, at every major bank in Manhattan, are almost all wearing something Swiss.
Both of them, in their own way, are right.
