“There is still tension in the supply chain,” says Jean-Marc Pontroue, CEO of Panerai. “But things should be back to normal in the next six months.
More than two years since the pandemic began, closing watchmakers’ factories and those of component-makers across the world, production has still not returned to normal.
Very few of the major Swiss watchmakers are making as many watches now as they were before the pandemic.
This decline in volume (compensated by rising prices per unit) has been a long term trend, but with demand so strong over the past 18 months, it might have been expected that more watches would be made.
According to Morgan Stanley’s annual report on the Swiss watch industry, Rolex is made slightly more watches in 2021 than it did in 2019 — 1,050,000 versus 1,000,000.
Omega’s output dropped from 720,000 watches in 2019 to 570,000 last year. Longines made 2,100,000 units in 2019 and 1,800,000 in 2021.
Everybody knows about shortages of unicorn watches from the likes of Rolex, Audemars Piguet and Patek Philippe, but the imbalance between rising demand and falling supply is causing scarcity to spread to more brands and more references from each brand.
Panerai, according to Mr Pontroue, has the balance about right, but supplies are starting to get tight.
“Panerai has always been fortunate because we never had serious shortages,” he says.
“I do not like to go around the world and see retailers that do not have our bestsellers in their cabinets. Panerai has never had a situation of oversupply in the market. The situation for us was that we had shortages during the pandemic, with some retailers running low,” he admits.
A return to pre-pandemic production levels cannot come soon enough.
