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Apple watch vs Swiss watches. Who’s gonna win?

Slidebean
12 min readSep 23, 2021

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Apple is known for bringing products into the mainstream. However, they are rarely the first to do anything. Instead, they wait and try to be the best, or at least, the most popular. But, how do they stack up against the titans of the industry, the Swiss watches?

Smartwatches have been around for a while. Still, we cannot question the popularity of the Apple Watch. Just look at this hard data:

  • The smartwatch sector is growing at approximately 20% YoY.
  • Furthermore, Apple is the most sold smartwatch, holding over 33% of the market, with the next competitor only at 8%.
  • At the same time, by 2017, you could already find reports that the Swiss watch industry was on a decline, and the pandemic made it a lot worse.
  • Now, as of today, Apple sells more watches than the entire Swiss watch industry. The gap widened in 2019 to 30.7M vs. 21.1M. That’s the number of watches sold.
  • Swiss watches are more expensive, certainly- but Apple watch sales for 2020 were $30.6B. The Swiss watch industry’s total exports were $15B.

Those are your Rolex, your Cartier, your Hublot- combined. So there is strong evidence to suggest that traditional…

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