Apple Watches are outselling Swiss timepieces, but Rolex isn't breaking a sweat

Horologists, fear not.

On Wednesday, consulting firm Strategy Analytics reported that Apple Watches outsold the entire Swiss Watch industry in 2019 by 10 million units. Tim Cook himself boasted about Apple's dominance over the traditional watch market in 2018. However, the latest data (and that specific 10 million figure) prompted speculation from many about how much Apple had disrupted those most elite makers of timepieces, the Swiss. 

But naturally, the story is more complicated than that — because "Swiss Watches" is a very broad term.

Apple doesn't release its sales figures, but to determine how many smart watches the company is slinging, Strategy Analytics used a "hybrid methodology of financial analysis and polled data from vendors." It found that Apple Watch sales increased 36 percent between 2018 and 2019. Meanwhile, sales of all Swiss watches declined by 13 percent in the same time frame. Read more...