Secretive Rolex remains Geneva’s largest employer

Posted by Dominique Wieland on 10 December 2010 | 0 Comments

Tags: Rolex, Geneva

By Giles Broom  -  An employment study names Rolex as Geneva’s largest private sector employer but the luxury watchmaker remains hush-hush about the secrets of its success. After the watch sector experiences a revival in the first part of 2010, economic uncertainty once again spreads concern in an industry forced to make heavy job cuts during the recession. Meanwhile, Geneva’s finance industry, the report reveals, cut almost 700 jobs in 2009. Geneva’s largest private-sector employer is keeping quiet about the secrets of its apparent success. The watchmaker Rolex employs more people than any other company in the canton, according to a recently published survey by PME Magazine, a Swiss business publication. But the Rolex Group refuses to divulge whether its high employment rate has any bearing on the state of its business, following an economic downturn which saw the watch making industry slash around 4,000 jobs. “Rolex does not communicate details of its commercial data,” said Rolex spokesperson, Virginie Chevailler, responding to questions from Swisster. The company has a high-profile advertising campaign, featuring Swiss tennis champion Roger Federer as one of its ambassadors. But the company is loath to say anything about the impact of its marketing or other details about its commercial activities. “We inform you that Rolex is a privately owned company and therefore we do not communicate on the data on the company's performance, nor on our benefits or our sponsorship strategies,” Chevailler said in a statement. “Therefore we regret not being able to meet your request.” Another spokeswoman said “we indeed have read the article in PME magazine and the study which was made…We have no particular comment to make on this subject.” With a staff of 4,025, Rolex is a larger employer than other Geneva giants, such as Proctor & Gamble, Migros and UBS. It is one of the iconic brands of Switzerland’s famous watch making industry, which added more than 19,000 jobs in the decade through 2008, according to an industry association. But the secrecy of Rolex, and other private companies, makes it hard to assess the current state of the industry amid economic jitters caused by tumbling stock markets and a weakened euro. Business in the watch-making sector dropped off during the recession, with exports down 22 percent in 2009. One enterprise, Franck Muller cut half of its 550 Geneva staff in 2009. But the industry rebounded during the first three months of 2010. Public company Swatch celebrated a 26 percent increase in the value of its shares during the first quarter of the year, against a 3.7 percent rise in the Swiss Market Index (SMI), which tracks a range of 20 largely defensive stocks across the Zurich exchange. Analysts spoke at the Baselworld watch fair in March of double-digit export growth in the sector. It is not certain whether Rolex, which started out as the vision of Bienne-based Hans Wildorf in the early twentieth century, is selling watches like hot cakes, or using price management techniques such as buying back inventories from retailers to maintain the exclusivity of its brand. Marketers in its jazzy headquarters in Geneva sell the famous Submariner (serial number 16613) appliance for around 8,100 francs. Despite its size and celebrity status, the company manages to avoid leaking information to the outside world, apart from an exceptional incident last week when a staffer at the Plan-les-Ouates factory in Geneva admitted to La Chaine Info television station that he had stolen five kilos of gold from the company. "There is an ongoing investigation," Rolex spokeswoman Chevailler later told the Bloomberg news agency. "I have no further comments to make." Economic austerity measures introduced by European governments and talk of a double-dip recession is displacing the optimistic spirit in export industries generated by first quarter profits. Rolex may be surviving due to its extensive branding work, notably in sports. In addition to the sponsorship deal with Federer, the watch maker is the official timekeeper of major tennis tournaments such as the Australian Open and Wimbledon. It also sponsors equestrian events and a sports car motor racing series in the US, among other things. Tie-ins with sports can often be lucrative. A competitor of Rolex, Omega, a brand of Swatch that sponsored the Vancouver Olympics, achieved a sales increase of 10 percent in 2009. Other signs suggest that luxury goods are weathering an awkward economic situation. Rolex advertises heavily in such publications as the Financial Times’ How to Spend It magazine and website,

which in June launched a new 3.4-million-franc advertising campaign, following a successful launch in October. Geneva’s key financial concerns fared less well than Rolex last year, according to the PME employment survey, with nearly 700 positions wiped out in 2009.

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