FRIDAY WIND DOWN: 1st July, 2016 – the finance edition
Felix Scholz
Happy new (fin) year everyone! Hope you’re all hard at work preparing your tax returns right now (only allowing for brief breaks to read updates from your favourite watch site). In other news it’s very cold in Melbourne right now. So cold in fact that we don’t need to refrigerate our wind down beers, we just leave them in the back room and nature does the rest.
What happened
Before we get into the dollars and cents, allow us to share one of the most impressive new releases of the week – the ochs & junior perpetual calendar. We featured the moonphase in our list of minimal watches the other week, and this one is definitely cut from the same cloth. Aside from its spartan good looks, the movement manages to use a mere nine additional parts (and three modified parts) to display the calendar. Compare that to 182 parts in the Patek Philippe Ref. 5204.
What really mattered
The Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry FH has released its statistics for May 2016, showing the downward trend continuing, with an 11.8% drop in the value of exports compared to May last year. There was a significant drop of around 23% in the export of watches cased in precious metals, with all major markets seeing negative growth, though Australia is performing far better than most, with exports here only falling by 0.1%.
At the cheaper and more cheerful end of the market, Daniel Wellington is still experiencing phenomenal success. Love them or hate them, the preppy NATO-strapped timepieces have certainly made their presence felt in the wider watch world. This story on Business Insider charts the Swedish brand’s five-year journey from start-up to $180 million company.
And finally, have you ever wondered what Hong Kong’s richest man wears on his wrist? Surely Li Ka-Shing (worth a cool 28 billion), wears some sort of fabulous Richard Mille or Greubel Forsey – right? Well, wrong. He told Bloomberg he wears a solar powered Citizen Eco-Drive worth a few hundred bucks. Oh, and he sets the time 30 minutes fast so he’s never late. Read the story over on watchesbySJX.
The week in numbers
4: Record breakers from the Rolex archives
5: Seconds it takes for the world’s fastest tourbillon to rotate
6: Temperature in degrees celsius as we type this in Melbourne with frozen fingers