Time To Reset & Rejuvenate

In an ideal world, with life-changing, planetshaping technologies at our disposal, we should have shrugged off a global pandemic like water off a duck’s back. But it has not turned out so; rather, with on-again, off-again lockdowns, mask mandates and travel bans, our efforts have been as heroic as they have been ham-fisted, like turning bolts with a wrong-sized wrench: go too gently, there’s no traction; force it, the bolt is damaged and the masses take to the streets.

- Yeo Suan Futt

At its worst, in the first half of 2020, air passenger traffic fell by two-thirds, and global GDP which had tracked between 2.33 and 3.28 per cent in preceding years, flipped the other way to -3.60 per cent. Baselworld was finished when Rolex, Patek Philippe, etc walked out in April, at around the same time that Swiss watch exports fell 62 per cent in value compared to 2019. Thankfully, the rest of 2020 wasn’t so bad and the industry ended the year losing just a bit more than a fifth of its value.

Has the world in 2021 been, as the World Bank described it, “poised to stage its most robust post-recession recovery in 80 years”? Just as we were about to do a wheelie, the Omicron variant has got us by the scruff of our necks, with growth forecasts for major countries including the US, Canada, China, India and Australia significantly downgraded, though there seem to be some bright spots in Europe.

But as sure as spring follows winter, things will change, and likely for the better after bumping against rock bottom. The Swiss watchmaking industry has done a phenomenal job of keeping an anachronistic, mechanical technology relevant and desirable in a digitalised 21st century.

Swiss watchmakers reinvent for the future.

Patek Philippe: The Custodian