Swatch Group H1 Profits Fall 70%, Dragged Down by China Slowdown
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PARIS — China’s consumption slowdown has bitten the Swatch Group hard, as the Swiss watchmaker posted a 70.5 percent drop in first-half net income to 147 million Swiss francs, or $164 million at current exchange rates.
Revenue for the first six months of 2024 reached 3.45 billion Swiss francs, or $3.86 billion, down 10.7 percent at constant exchange rates. It came in short of consensus expectations of 3.72 billion Swiss francs, or $4.16 billion.
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Foreign exchange variations left a dent of 145 million Swiss francs in the semester, the company noted. Its EBIT, or earnings before interest and taxes, totaled 225 million Swiss francs, less than half of what it was in 2023 for the same period.
Piral Dadhania, analyst at RBC, deemed these first-half results “worse than feared on weak China trends” and expected markets to react negatively.
By mid-morning trading, Swatch shares were down 11 percent to 168.35 Swiss francs, or $188.30 at current exchange rates.
Bernstein senior analyst Luca Solca wondered if these first-half results could trigger a move to delist the Swiss group, or a fight for takeover from other major groups.
Swatch Group said that its decline in sales for the first half of 2024 was triggered by a sharp drop in demand for luxury goods in Greater China, which includes the Hong Kong and Macau special administrative regions, as well as Southeast Asia, due to the drop in Chinese tourists.
Overall, first-half sales were “above those of the previous year in local currencies, except for China,” it stated, pointing out they were 5.6 percent above 2022’s levels for the same period.
Only the Swatch brand came through relatively unscathed, growing 10 percent in sales against the first half of 2023.
The group also highlighted the sharp drop in operating margin, which stood at 11 percent against last year’s 19 percent, saying that it came from the “deliberate maintaining of marketing investments.”
Elsewhere, the picture was better. While geopolitical unrest made European retailers wary of excess stock, which resulted in a 10 percent decrease in wholesale revenues, sales in the group’s own retail network were stable against last year.
Swatch Group fared well in the U.S., where it remained flat with “the same record sales” as in 2023, and Japan where sales leapt 30 percent to hit a record. South Korea, India and the United Arab Emirates also outperformed 2023’s sales results for the same period, it said.