Any year is a great one to be Rolex, but this year, in particular, is turning out to be special for the luxury watchmaker. For the first time ever, the leading Swiss watchmaker achieved a new milestone by setting sales records of an unprecedented nature: a whopping $10 billion. The fact that Rolex is selling is no shocking news, but the watch brand produced 1.24 million timepieces in 2023, a truly astonishing number which resulted in sales of 10.1 billion Swiss francs ($11.5 billion). Analysts at Morgan Stanley and Swiss firm LuxeConsult compared the results to 2022 and discovered a gain of 11%. They added that Rolex’s current level of market share is “unprecedented,” per Bloomberg.
Coming at numbers two and three were Cartier and Omega, which were not even halfway close to Rolex’s records at 3.1 Swiss francs and 2.6 billion Swiss francs, respectively. Despite popular models like the Cartier Tank and Santos De Cartier, Seamaster, and Speedmaster, the luxury labels were far-flung from Rolex’s reach. Rolex was founded in 1905 by Hans Wilsdorf; in comparison, Cartier and Omega are much older brands founded in 1847 and 1848, but neither has managed to set such staggering sales records in centuries.
According to Morgan Stanley, the Rolex brand remains the unchallenged No. 1 within the luxury watch industry, with greater sales than that of the five following brands combined: Cartier, Omega, Audemars Piguet, Patek Philippe, and Richard Mille. It looks like 2024 belongs to the Rolex brand, which is clearly reigning supreme, and by a respectable margin.
