Watch This Space

The Old & The New

 

 

Interesting piece in today's FT in the Watches and Jewellery supplement, on the Chinese watchmaking industry. Anyone who knows me or has read any of the relevant blog posts will know I love mechanical watches and engineering in general. That I am also too impoverished to seriously indulge in what can be a very, no ruinously expensive hobby, is also a given. I own a small clutch of watches, whose combined value wouldn't buy me a basic Rolex. To be honest, my daily 'beater' as they are known in the trade, is a £120 quartz diver; it wears well, is as tough as old boots and tells the time accurately. Also, I have a thing about good engineering not being used properly or regularly; a lot of watch collectors have so much stuff stored away in air-conditioned vaults, they're a lot like some Art 'collectors'. At the end of it all, you really only wear one watch at a time; rotating your way through several hundred has got to devalue the experience somewhat through dilution: a top-end first-world problem if ever there was one.

Many of the more well-known established manufactures are still really only playing the image game and trading on their brand, like sportswear or whatever else logo-ed product. That's not to say that their watches are substance-free crap, but the ubiquity of some marques, despite their price tag, makes them a tad, well; prosaic. I tend to like the manufactures lying at the fringes of the 'affordable', and that's the thing; to most people, the thought of spending even hundreds of pounds or dollars on a watch, let alone thousands, tens of thousands or considerably larger sums, would simply be unthinkable and certainly untenable. Remember, Raffa Nadal's Richard Mille pieces - which I assume he doesn't have to pay for - are north of a million quid apiece and compared with the money paid at auction  for one of Paul Newman's Daytona's in recent years, well don't ask...and we still haven't reached the pinnacle of watch prices: Belgravia mansion values, anyone?

Back to the Chinese. Reading the FT piece, what strikes me is the expanding Chinese domestic market for their own products, which would seem to be growing in cachet due to the Covid crisis turning domestic focus on home-grown product. As China now represents possibly the largest consumer market globally, trends set there will soon make their way out west, along with products including high-end mechanical watchmaking. They've done it with electronic digital tech; they can certainly do it with mechanical and analogue. I would say a good place to start putting even a modest investment, either in companies, or indeed in the products themselves, would be in Chinese horology; I think there will be the kind of growth we've seen in Korea's penetration of world markets in recent years. The Chinese have a long, long history of culture, philosophy and just as importantly technology, that stretches back to a time when most Europeans were still belting each other with clubs. We ignore China at our cost. In so many ways.