Last month showed a small sign of a recovery, but still saw Swiss watch exports decline by -35%. This month, we still saw declines in Swiss watch exports, but definitely some small signs of recovery continued. Exports totaled CHF 1.6 billion where wrist watches were the focal point of the total.

The 12 month moving averaged continued its plateau that we noticed last and fell just above -15%. This shows some sort of normalizing of figures, and the slowing of the sharp decline that we saw from March to May of this year.

Watch exports by metal and by price category show interesting trends in what people are buying as economic activity resumes. Price categories show the resilience of more expensive watches, while less expensive watches are taking the hit in both units and price categories. Every metal continues to fall, even though steel-gold only posted single digit percentage declines.

The top six main markets saw signs of recovery global economies where China, the United Kingdom and the UAE, to name a few, posting positive export results. Again, the top six markets were dominated by countries in Asia. There were some economies such as Germany and USA that saw only slight negative declines - a display of their economies opening up as well.

August Predictions

August has been very similar to July in that economies are slowing opening up and manufactures are producing watches again. We do not expect results for next month to show immense growth, but the slow creep towards the positive territory. We predict similar export results as July, and expect results to be around -15%.