Reply to Rolex

Forum Index » Off-Topic

Reply to "Rolex"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It's the McDonald's of luxury watches. Everyone has one.

And yet Rolex will require you to get on a waiting list for most models, even though they produce 1.1mln watches a year -- the largest watch producer in the world.

[/quote]

People keep throwing around the 1.1M watches produced each year statistic.

The majority of those are Oyster Perpetuals and Datejusts. The Datejust alone has +/- 700 different combinations of dials, bezels, bracelets and watch materials(steel vs precious metal).

There are somewhere between 1,400 and 1,800 authorized Rolex dealers. When you divide 1.1M by 1,600 that provides an average number of 688 watches per year for each dealer. That’s under 2 watches a day they could sell.

Does that put things in perspective?

Most of the watches sold are the gateway models. As previously mentioned, the OP & DJ lines, but also the Air King and Explorer 1 models.

In total Rolex sells 15 distinct model families. Some are produced in significantly smaller numbers annually, which leads to scarcity and increases demand.

The Submariner and Submariner date are the watches most people see day to day. They are very versatile, and on the lower end of Rolex pricing at $10,500 and $11,350 respectively in steel. In the current catalog there are only 3 steel variants. The Submariner no-date comes one way, steel oyster bracelet, black dial, black bezel. It’s what James Bond wore until Omega paid to be Bond’s watch. The Submariner date in steel only differs in that it offers both a black and green bezel. No one outside of Rolex knows how many Subs they make each year, but it’s not enough to satisfy demand. That’s why there are waits.

When you get into the GMT-Master IIs, Daytonas, Land-Dwellers and Sky-Dwellers the demand goes through the roof while the available supply also drops. Dealers may get one or two of these models a year in the most sought after configurations.

All that to say, the 1.1M number can be deceiving.

[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics