The average price of an Omega watch, he noted, had tripled over the past 20 years, in part because improvements to materials, resistance and accuracy improved values. (He also said Omega’s volumes were on track to pass 600,000 units this year, which would be an increase of about 20 percent year over year.)
Swiss watch companies rarely reveal their average retail prices, but according to an estimate published in Morgan Stanley’s 2022 annual watch report, Omega’s average price was 6,571 Swiss francs, before tax. (According to the report, Longines is the only Swiss watch company that ranks it among the industry’s top 10 by sales, but whose average price of 1,088 Swiss francs falls short of the federation’s top price category.)
Premiumization, as Morgan Stanley called it in the report and businesses have been talking about for months, has encouraged some midmarket brands such as TAG Heuer to increase their average prices, rather than their volumes, to pursue growth.
“In 2018, our average price point was 2,200” Swiss francs, Frédéric Arnault, TAG Heuer’s chief executive, said. “We recently went above 3,000 Swiss francs.”
Mr. Arnault said that the brand’s output was increasing, but of greater significance was the changing profile of customers. “Ten years ago, the core focus was the customer who had one watch in his lifetime, maybe two, and one of the two had to be a TAG Heuer,” he said. “And yes, it’s true there’s less of this customer, but the collector customer base profile has grown a lot in the past 10 years. There are a lot more people collecting watches and now this is taking a much bigger share in our customers.”
