?The smartwatch subject is an excuse,? claims Marc A. Hayek, head of the Swatch Group’s luxury brands Breguet, Blancpain and Jaquet Droz. In this brief interview with WatchTime’s Rüdiger Bucher, Hayek speaks on the watch industry’s future and his brands’ quests for luxury, desirability, and tradition.
Marc A. Hayek
RB: Do you envision a change in buying behavior arising because of  younger clients with different values, or would it be more due to competition from smartwatches"
MH: Buying behavior basically has not changed. I notice this, amongst other things, in our boutiques. The subject of the smartwatch is, rather, an excuse ? since it is easier for someone to hold the smartwatch responsible for current problems than to admit to making mistakes. In the nineties, when mobile phones began to spread, many “doom merchants” also prophesied that no one would need watches anymore because it was possible to read the time on a mobile [phone] and it could also be done more precisely that way. Today, this has intensified even more because we are surrounded by the time on screens and displays. Interestingly, though, the boom years for the mobile phone were by far the strongest years of growth for mechanical watches. Furthermore, we are talking about a luxury brand which manufactures a few tens of thousands of units per year. This is a completely different market from the smartwatch, which has its niche in the consumer electronics s...