deux longs articles ...marrants
[ chronomania.net - Les archives de l'ancien forum ]
écrit par Xav le 03 septembre 2002 17:53:45:
piqués sur paneristi
le premier de Forbes bien ***fouillis*** et qui parle de tout notre trip en gros quôa...l
le deuxième plus fun, ca me rappelle curieusement un truc .. vous remplacer singapour par espagne et sub panerai par explorer Rolex trop fort
en bref à lire pour les ceusses qui jaspinent le britton !
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Time Is Money: The more they cost, the more obsolete their technology, the more you want one. What is it about Swiss watches?
BY Joshua Levine09/18/2000
ForbesIN LATE JULY FINANCIERE RICHEMONT, A HOLDING COMPANY for costly Swiss watch brands, paid $1.86 billion to acquire Les Manufactures Horlogeres, another Swiss watchmaker. The price works out to nearly nine times sales. Was it fancy technology that Richemont got? Far from it. With Horlogeres it picked up the 167-year-old movement-maker Jaeger-LeCoultre, along with watch brands IWC and A. Lange & Sohne, which means it got its hands on a collection of workshops where men in white aprons construct tiny little spring-wound timekeeping mechanisms accurate to within eight seconds a day. That isn't even as accurate as a $10 quartz Timex. Horlogeres is not high tech. It is what the Swiss call "high mech."
To understand why brands of mechanical watches are so sought after you have to understand why the watches are sought after. To do that you've got to look at people like Brian Ehrmantraut. Now 37, Ehrmantraut knew nothing about watches when his employer, Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Network Appliance, went public in 1995, and he suddenly found himself with lots of money. All he knew was that James Bond wore a Rolex Submariner, so Ehrmantraut bought one, too.
That was just the beginning. Today he's a watch junkie with 80 fancy mechanical watches and counting. "I discovered that for the price of a Ferrari or two, I could put together a pretty good collection," says Ehrmantraut. His latest purchase is a handmade $69,000 Tourbillon by F.P. Journe, who makes only a few dozen watches a year.
"It's an antidote to the technology I work with every day," says the semiretired techie. "These things are made by people sitting at benches, not computers. When you look at one of these things through a magnifying glass, you can see that a human being worked on it. It can never match a $50 Swatch, but I really like the futility of that--there's something noble and tragic about it."Not so tragic if you live along the banks of Lac Leman, where Geneva's high-mech moguls keep their low-key estates. Two decades since it was left on the same dust heap as the manual typewriter and the rotary phone, the $5.5 billion, 400-year-old Swiss watch business suddenly looks as frisky as a wireless startup.
Today there is even the rare newcomer Swiss luxury brand, which says a lot in a business where a centuries-old pedigree counts for everything. Christian Bedat, 35, launched Bedat & Co. three years ago (see "The Upstart"). "If you tried to do this ten years ago, they would lock you up," says Bedat.
A quartz watch that serves its purpose well enough can come from anywhere. But the high-priced mechanical watches almost all come from Switzerland. Sales of mechanical Swiss watches are up 80% in the U.S. since 1996, to $377 million (wholesale). This is exclusively the province of luxury-goods makers. The average wholesale price in this segment is $1,000.
Why is this archaic consumer product doing so well? The roaring economy has a lot to do with it, of course, but there are other things going on. Swiss watches took on their mystique only when they were obsolete technologically. That sounds paradoxical, but you have seen this before. It was obsolescence that made horses and fountain pens into status symbols.
Another psychological factor in the frenzy may be a perception of scarcity--a perception artfully exploited by the vendors. When Rolex put its Daytona back on the market in 1991, after three years of having none for sale, the waiting list grew to six years.
And then there is the peacock-feather explanation. The tail feathers aren't for flight but for displaying to other birds that the possessor has biological resources to spare. Among higher animals, jewelry serves this purpose. Men generally don't wear jewelry around their necks or ears, but they can feel very comfortable displaying a $13,000 Bedat on a wrist.
In Europe and Asia wrist hardware goes a long way toward ranking one guy in an expensive suit over another. In Italy the average adult owns five watches, and at least four glossy magazines cover the latest models and trends.
It's unlikely the U.S. will ever end up as watch-mad as Italy, but it's beginning to move that way. A cool watch is becoming a kind of hot rod for the wrist. With one big difference. "If you're 18 years old, are you going to buy a BMW or a $1,500 Tag Heuer?" says Susan Nicholas, chief executive of Tag Heuer, U.S.
It's a guy thing. "When the people who buy these things were kids, they hid under the covers with a flashlight looking at car magazines, not Playboy," says Richard Paige, who closed his California jewelry stores four years ago and started his watch Web site, Timezone.com, in 1996.
Last year Timezone offered an online course in watch repair. Even Page was shocked when 800 guys signed up just so they could tinker under the hood. "I mean, in the U.S., knowing how to fix a watch used to be about as glamorous as being a plumber," he says.
Swiss watch sales might have climbed higher still, but there just aren't enough master watchmakers left, even though young Swiss are now rushing in to replenish their badly depleted ranks. "We could have sold 20% to 25% more watches in each of the last few years if we could have produced them," says Henry Edelman, president of Patek Philippe in the U.S. "You walk through our workshops and you see people over 50 and people under 35 and no one in between. The Swiss felt there was no future in it. All of a sudden it became a career again."
Edelman remembers peddling Pateks in the late 1970s and fending off job offers from retailers who promised to hire him when--not if--Patek went under. Now Edelman is telling many of these same retailers to place their Patek orders now for the year 2002 or risk getting shut out.
It takes eight to nine years to train the workmen who make the newest Patek Philippe model, due to arrive in stores this November. These artisans have broken new ground with a nonautomatic mechanism that carries a 240-hour power reserve, breaking the current standard by a full day. A hundred twizzles of the thumb and index finger and you're good for well over a week. Patek is only making 3,000 of these "Ten-Day" watches, which cost $27,500 and up.
Patek Philippe has been owned by the Stern family of Geneva since 1932, and the current chairman, Philippe Stern--his father named him after the watch--vows to keep it that way. But Stern is part of a shrinking minority. In the past few years the titans of the luxury-goods trade have been swallowing up the tiny, family-run watchmakers that dot the Vallee de Joux and other mountain hamlets around Geneva. There are still hundreds of them, and many of them have been there ever since the 16th century, when the austere Jean Calvin banned the wearing of jewelry and so pushed the goldsmiths of Geneva into the unflashy business of making pocket watches. (The migration of the device from pocket to wrist took place only around 1900.)
The brightest jewels in the Swiss watchmaking crown have already been bought and parceled out among three groups (see "Who's Got the Time"). Even the most sober-minded Swiss are hard put to resist the prices being paid. "I offered $130 million for Ebel, and it was worth maybe $90 million," says Severin Wunderman, who owns Corum watches. "Instead, LVMH buys it for around $300 million--insanity!"
Not that Wunderman is complaining. He was the distributor for Gucci watches in the U.S. when Francois Pinault's Pinault-Printemps-Redoute bought a white-knight stake in Gucci last year. Among other things, the big groups are cutting out the army of watch-distribution middlemen, who (in most arrangements) keep a fairly hefty gross margin but have to foot significant advertising bills out of it.
Wunderman knew he faced the same fate as other agents, but he had no intention of walking away empty-handed when his contract expired. "I took the Gucci people to the factory vault and showed them one million watches," he says in an accent that falls somewhere between Paris and Flatbush. "I told them that for the sale of every box of"--here Wunderman names a personal hygiene product that he asks not be mentioned in print--"I will sell a Gucci watch unless you buy me out of my contract tomorrow." He says Gucci bought him out for $150 million. "These are wonderful times," says Wunderman, who was recently treated for cancer and is now back selling watches.
Among the big boys the battle lines have now been drawn. With the three brands it just acquired, Richemont now controls an estimated 19% to 22% of the market for watches priced over $1,500. It also owns Cartier, Vacheron Constantin, Piaget and the trendy Italian navy watch, Officine Panerai.
Left gnashing his teeth is Bernard Arnault, the head of French luxury powerhouse LVMH, which has amassed an estimated 10% of the prestige market last year by buying Tag Heuer (for close to $1 billion), Ebel, jeweler Chaumet and movement-manufacturer Zenith. Arnault griped about the all-Swiss coziness of the Richemont deal, but he got little sympathy. "Where I come from, we have a saying--cowboys don't cry," was the reported response from Richemont's South Africa-born chairman, Johann Rupert.
Another formidable competitor is Swatch Group, better known for the cheap plastic watches that helped save Switzerland when the quartz revolution looked as if it would relocate the entire watch industry to the Far East. Nowadays the fun little plastic Swatch is taking a beating, but the company is doing just fine, thanks to the mechanical watches Swatch rescued. Last year Swatch bought watchmaker Breguet, which was founded in 1775. It also owns Omega, Blancpain, Longines, Rado and movement maker ETA.
Which leaves only Rolex, an unstoppable force that holds 25% of the high-end market with basically one watch, the Oyster, while keeping the company's inner workings almost completely hidden behind a gold-clad fortress in Geneva (see "As Tight as an Oyster"). Rolex sells an estimated 650,000 watches a year, worth perhaps $1.4 billion at retail. But unlike other manufacturers that are constantly cutting new dies for new models, Rolex has far lower costs.
"Everybody is afraid of Rolex, but the true aficionado knows that it makes what is pretty much an indestructible watch," says Jeffrey Hess, who has written an unauthorized history of the company with James M. Dowling. "We mind our own business," says a Rolex spokesperson, explaining in an interview with FORBES why the company will basically not comment about, well, anything.
It must be a good business, to judge from the facts about watch economics that can be teased from other players in the industry. A steel case with a sapphire crystal can be bought from an outside supplier for between $40 and $250. Movements will run from $10 to as high as $2,000. And then the numbers get interesting.
The manufacturer may double its manufacturing cost in arriving at a wholesale price to the distributor. The distributor in turn doubles its price in selling to the retailer, who doubles the price once again to the consumer. Before you know it, a watch that cost $500 to manufacture ends up with a price tag between $4,000 and $5,000.
Complain, if you want, about the giant mark-up, but that is beside the point for a buyer who perceives that he is acquiring a work of art. You may as well complain that Matisse marked up his oil paintings.
Image is everything in today's watch business, pushing up marketing costs dramatically. Omega spent $2.3 million on advertising in 1995. It spent $10 million last year. Five years ago Tag Heuer could get its sports watch into a Hollywood feature simply by giving it away to the stars. Today it often bids against Omega, Breitling and Rolex for the privilege of paying between $2 million and $3 million for the timekeeping role in a big feature. Omega got James Bond, but Tag scored Shaft. "If you can get the brand onto the right wrists, you can get a kind of cult following," says LVMH's U.S. watch chief, Susan Nicholas.
Whatever it does, the Swiss business goes first class. You can see the industry's opulence at the trade fair it mounts each spring in Basel. Within the vast exhibit hall the lords of horology hold court in miniature crystal palaces, many costing as much as $5 million. ("That's a bit misleading," protests one company head. "We use the same booth over and over again.") Severin Wunderman's booth displays some paintings he owns--a Degas, a Picasso, a Toulouse-Lautrec, among others. Inside the wood-paneled Chopard booth, guests recline on velvet settees, sipping 1984 Chateau La Conseillante while white-gloved attendants pass around Beluga caviar--about $17,000 worth for the five-day show. A perfect arrangement of white roses graces each table, where retailers whisper their orders for the coming year.
Chopard, owned by the Scheufele family since 1963, is still best known for jewelry and women's watches, but it is trying hard to change that. "I analyzed the business in 1995, and the only thing to do was to create our own movement and be recognized as a manufacture," says Karl-Friedrich Scheufele, the fourth-generation scion vice president of Chopard. "Everybody in the family thought I was crazy."
The result is Chopard's L.U.C. Quattro--the initials stand for Louis-Ulysse Chopard--a $19,000 watch with a 216-hour power reserve. The Quattro was a huge hit at the Basel show, despite its having a winding duration one day shorter than Patek's. The watch has a four-barrel power plant (is this beginning to sound like a Pontiac GTO?) in which one spring, on being wound down, transfers control to the next. "We like the difficulty of that," says Scheufele with a satisfied smile.
You can see high mech up close at Chopard's factory in Fleurier, a two-hour drive from Geneva. Many of the tiny metal pieces are cut with a new mechanical process that runs electric current through a hair-thin filament. The design of the movement itself would be impossible without three-dimensional computer imaging. "Ten years ago we used to worry about what the Japanese were doing," says Eric Broulis, the technical director at Fleurier. "Now we don't even look."
For all the software, however, there's plenty of old-fashioned labor. Alone at a workbench, a woman sits etching nearly invisible striations into minuscule pieces. There is no function to these decorative notches, which you need a jeweler's loupe to see clearly. Moreover, many of the pieces on which they are engraved will be hidden away deep inside the watch movement, never to be seen by anyone again. They do it that way because that's the way they do it.
Across the road from Chopard in Fleurier is the small workshop of Michel Parmigiani. Now 50, Parmigiani spent most of his career restoring antique clocks and creating one-of-a-kind pieces for collectors. When he started out, it could not have been a worse time to start fiddling with flywheels. Seiko introduced the first quartz watch on Christmas Day, 1969, and everyone, the Swiss included, rushed to adopt a technology that was at once more reliable, more accurate and much cheaper to produce. In a quartz watch a battery runs current through a synthetic quartz crystal, which vibrates at 32,600 beats per second. Before long Omega, the reigning Swiss brand, was melting down its gold mechanical watches so it could sell the metal.
It was depressing. "Every day another concern failed, and the newspapers were black with bad news," Parmigiani recalls. Still, he says, he followed a fil rouge--a red thread--that led him unswervingly toward Switzerland's grand patrimoine de l'horlogerie. In 1996 the Sandoz family backed Parmigiani in a venture to sell watches under his own name. He's producing 1,500 a year, but he doesn't want to go beyond 2,000. "At some point, mathematics stops and the nose takes over," explains the master watchmaker. You can buy Parmigiani's "Toric" platinum chronograph with automatic perpetual retrograde calendar for $54,900.
Parmigiani was in the U.S. recently to deliver a one-of-a-kind minute repeater to a client in Chicago. The price: $330,000. "You never talked to the watchmaker before--his world was one-foot square," says Joseph C. Thompson, editor of American Time, a trade publication that has just converted to consumer readership. "Now he's suddenly sexy--an artist."
If one person deserves the credit for keeping this flame flickering when it was about to go out, many people would nominate Jean-Claude Biver, albeit reluctantly. Biver happens to be a Luxembourger by birth, which is probably a lucky thing, since the Swiss are a lot better at making watches than at marketing them. Biver is one of the great marketers of all time.
In 1982, with the Swiss watch business gasping and quartz triumphant everywhere, Biver bought the brand name Blancpain for $12,000. Blancpain had pretty much stopped making watches in the 1970s--it had once supplied diving watches to the U.S. Navy--and hadn't been much of a factor in the industry for a long time before that. What it did have, however, was a nominal lineage to 1735. Biver relaunched the brand with the inspired, if somewhat misleading, slogan: "Since 1735 there has never been a quartz Blancpain watch. And there never will be."
The Blancpain booth at Basel resembles a Swiss mountain farmhouse straight out of Heidi, as does the company's Disneyfied factory. "Blancpain was nothing, but when we bought the brand, we had a marketing approach where everything was in line. The watchmakers used to work in farmhouses, SO WE WILL WORK IN FARMHOUSES!" screams Biver, his watchmaker's leather apron tied around a 6-foot-2-inch frame.
In 1992 Swatch Group bought Blancpain, which this year will produce around 9,000 watches priced between $15,000 and $700,000. Biver's got a much bigger soapbox now. "Quartz is a genius child of technology and will become an ADULT of technology and WILL DIE!" he yells, the veins in his neck bulging. "But ART WILL NEVER DIE!!!"
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Help! I accidentally bought a watch
06/30/2000
Business Times (Singapore)The writer, who goes by the pen name Mycroft, is a true-blue Singaporean who loves food almost as much as he loves his watches. A medical professional, his passions are known to include cameras and pens as well
AFTER contentedly being in watch-buying remission heaven for months, I noticed the symptoms of Mycroft's Psychosis creeping back. I had not checked the time with the telephone service in months -- a wonderful indicator of remission.Then one day I walked past my favourite watch shop and felt a disturbance in the Force. It pulled at me to walk in. I tried to walk past nonchalantly, but was whipped around inexplicably by an unseen hand.
I had to enter, there was no getting out of it. That time, I walked out with a Jaeger Le-Coultre Atmos Atlantis -- a rather large timepiece, actually a clock. The degree of deterioration of my sanity can be judged by my considering procuring a strap to affix this beauty onto my wrist. Alas, it was not to be. Now it rests proudly spinning its pendulum in silent beauty in my study.Then another day, I was browsing innocuously in a lower-end watch shop. Surely I would not stoop to buying cheapos -- so I was safe, I thought. Nonetheless, I spied an elegant timepiece with day and date in a pilot's design, hence wonderfully legible. I was seized by a fit of madness.
I swear the credit card flew out of my wallet without my hands touching it. Even now, the incident draws a blank in my mind -- my unconscious denial blocking off any rememberance of my criminal activity.
Then today, I went to visit my watch personality, the now famous Wilson. Where I did not think about entering a watch shop before -- that haven of Evil -- now the lure has dug its claws in and the craving begins once again. The addiction is taking hold, because I find myself denying that it is a problem -- that I can stop visiting watch shops at any time. After all, there's nothing wrong with just looking, right?
I had taken to wearing crosses and a necklace of garlic. The odd looks and wrinkled noses were a small price to pay. I was secure, nothing could touch me.
I wanted to see the latest arrivals from Dubey & Schaldenbrand. I felt a tug, but it was not strong -- I proudly resisted. I smiled to myself -- I was in control.
Then I met my classmate of many years. He was proudly wearing a Panerai GMT with a vertical patterned dial. Beautiful, I thought. We talk about Langes, Pateks that he owns and how he has become a movement man -- much like myself. Then we go back to his Panerai.
He was telling me how it fit well even on his small wrist. I have tracked Panerais since their launch here in Singapore nearly two years ago. They attracted me but I had thought them too large for me.
Then Wilson mentioned that they just might have a few other pieces, such as the Panerai Ti Submersible. My jaw fell and immediately I felt cold sweat trickle down my neck. I had always thought the Ti Submersible was the most beautiful in the range.
I begin to salivate and the drool escaped from the corners of my mouth. I felt a weakness come over me, I became light-headed.
Then because the watch was in another branch, friend Wilson rushed off to get it. I sat down to talk to my friend again. My conscience screamed at me to get out while I could -- cut and run! But my feet were leaden, they stayed rooted to the spot. I sweated as the seconds ticked by and I kept looking at the door to see if Wilson had returned. Perhaps there was still time to make a break for the door and run before he came back...
My friend continued talking -- I glanced at him, seeing the lips move, but not really hearing the words. He was just going on and on about something...Time dragged on and everyone seemed to be moving in slow motion -- I was in a daze -- quite catatonic and helpless -- held in a vice grip to my chair.
Then our man Wilson burst through the door with the Ti Submersible clutched in his pudgy hands. He handed it to me to look and I felt the last vestige of resistance crumble, my dignity evaporated as my sense of self-control fled. What had previously been proud resistance lay in pieces on the floor and in ruins, as did my self-esteem.
The Submersible is a beautiful piece of sculpture in titanium. Shaped in curves and angles with the wonderful satin feel of matt grey light metal. It felt just so in my hands. I do not remember what else happened next, but I must have crept out of the shop a sobbing wreck, the Panerai on my wrist and my remission at an end.
The relapse was swift and fatal. I rip off the garlic string in disgust, it was useless. I am hopelessly in despair. I have to think of what to do next. Perhaps I will seek an exorcist and throw myself at his mercy. Perhaps I shall flagellate myself in penance for this great sin.
I have to go now, I need to fast and prepare myself to cleanse my soul. Anyone know a good exorcist ...?
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