Two weeks ago, on April 14, Baselworld’s parent company MCH Group took note “with great surprise […] of the cancellation of major exhibitors at Baselworld,” namely Rolex, Patek Philippe, Chanel, Tudor, and Chopard. Two years before that, on July 30, 2018, the company’s former CEO René Kamm was already caught off guard by Swatch Group?s decision to leave the show: “The cancellation is all the more surprising for us because this news reaches us at a point in time when new management has arrived with a new team, new esprit and many new ideas.? In both cases, the company’s unfiltered public display of surprise was followed by the desire to either directly “contradict the representation” (July 30, 2018) of its former clients, or, more recently, by questioning the intentions of the aforementioned five brands. MCH Group’s latest response (April 14, 2020): “The MCH Group must therefore conclude that the relevant plans [to leave Baselworld] have been in preparation for some time and that the discussions concerning the financial arrangements for the cancellation of Baselworld 2020 are now being put forward as an argument.”
The company’s reactions were remarkable for two reasons:

Firstly, in a consensus-driven society like Switzerland, you rarely see a supplier publicly react as confrontational as this: the Swiss, already used to having one of the world’s oldest democracies, usually don’...