The first-ever half-year loss in the history of Swatch Group - this is the main result of the report provided by the group in mid-July.
While acknowledging the severity of the fall, the founder and CEO Nick Hayek is staying positive. The reason for this is the summer indicators for the Chinese market. A place where the global drop initially started (-83% in retail in February), now shows the first signs of improvement. Already in May, the growth of retail sales through its stores in China was at the level of 76%.
Considering this fact, Swatch Group is confident that its annual results will be in a positive zone. In the meantime, net sales for the first half-year decreased by 46.1% to 2.2 billion CHF, and losses amounted to 308 million CHF (for comparison, for the first six months of 2019, Swatch Group received a profit of 415 million CHF).
The Richemont group also presented its financial report. The losses of famous watch houses (A. Lange & Söhne, Baume & Mercier, IWC, Jaeger-LeCoultre, Panerai, Piaget, Roger Dubuis, and Vacheron Constantin) was even higher than for Swatch Group — 56%.
However, these figures are recorded for the first quarter of the current fiscal year. This reporting period ended on June 30. If we are talking about all areas of Richemont's business, the overall decline was recorded at the level of 47%. The retail sector lost 43% of the sales, while the wholesale sector experienced immediate losses of 65%. The smallest losses were felt by online sales, which lost 22%.
Other significant players – LVMH and Kering - will report their financial results at the end of July.