Swatch boss Nick Hayek speaks plainly: “We sell watches, not stocks”

At the beginning of the year, the first analysts’ conference escalated, and after the sharp drop in the half-year figures, criticism continued to grow. Doesn’t that hurt you?

The financial community was not happy with me even before our conference in January. We know the representative and experience the same thing every year. Their business model is to sell shares, mine is to make and sell beautiful watches. For me as an entrepreneur, it makes no difference whether an analyst has a positive opinion of the share or not; it is irrelevant to our business model or strategy. That is the usual discussion. They remained boringly decent in January too, until a gentleman intervened who should not have been there at all, as he was not an analyst but a fund manager with a relatively small portfolio of Swatch Group shares.