Passed relatively unnoticed among the general public in the middle of the summer, the information has the effect of a small bomb in the hushed world of the watchmaking world. On July 30, 2018, Swatch, the giant of swiss watches, said it would not participate to Baselworld, the great mass of the sector held in Basel since almost a century. It is through a press release scathing, pointing to “the lack of creativity and courage” of the organizing company of the fair, MCH, Nick Hayek, the heir to the Swatch group, has formalized its decision. A boycott that has not been the sole consequence of the hasty departure of the director general of MCH Rene Kamm, but has also cast a chill over the whole-of-chain event. “The traditional fairs have no more sense for Swatch,” furthermore, Nick Hayek, to drive the point home.
The number one in the world of watchmaking is not the only multinational corporation to move away from this type of events. Since 2014, car shows in Frankfurt, Paris, Geneva, and even Detroit, are facing a wave of defections on a large scale. In may, Volkswagen announced that, for the first time, the mark will not have a booth at the Mondial de Paris. Has its sides, Fiat, Ford, Volvo, Nissan, Infiniti, or even Opel / vauxhall have also said package. As for the salon du livre in paris, he confronts the past several years, the absence of a few large publishing houses such as Grasset, Stock, or Fayard (all properties of the Hachette group), who denounce the cost of this event.
A medium that has weathered the crisis
Then that opens the great show season in France, should we conclude that these appointments, previously unavoidable, do more dreaming ? That at the time of scanning, the events “hard” have no reason to be ? Difficult to answer simply to this question. The salons of the tech, for example, as the ces in Las Vegas, or MWC, Berlin, are today…
