Patek Philippe
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As the years have gone by the Green Pebbles Girls have become increasingly fond of Swiss watchmaking, an amazing industry steeped in tradition and true craftsmanship and ever evolving.
We were not surprised therefore to wake up to some very good news for the Swiss watchmaking industry which showed an increase of 19.2% with exports of nearly 19.3 billion francs, growth in the last 20 years has never been so strong.
The success is further heightened by the fact that Swiss watchmaking industry (along with other Swiss based industries) have had to deal with the renewed strength of the Swiss franc in 2011, as well as the difficult financial period generally.
The greatest importers of watches (of these 94% were wrist watches) were the usual suspects:
| 1. | Hong Kong | 4,085.9 | +28.3% | |
| 2. | USA | 1,984.6 | +18.4% | |
| 3. | China | 1,636.3 | +48.7% | |
| 4. | France | 1,296.4 | +10.9% | |
| 5. | Singapore | 1,146.4 | +27.5% | |
| 6. | Italy | 1,011.8 | +9.5% | |
| 7. | Japan | 909.2 | +12.6% | |
| 8. | Germany | 899.2 | +17.0% | |
| 9. | United Arab Emirates | 682.9 | +17.9% | |
| 10. | United Kingdom | 659.0 | +10.4% |
Table from Féderation de l'industrie de l'Haute Horologère Suisse
Over one in two of the watches exported were manufactured from steel (more than 15 million timepieces sold). Other genres such as non metallic saw volumes rise by 18.8%. The highest growth by far was seen by gold watches at +26.5%, while bimetallic were close behind with an increase of 24.7%!