Twenty years ago, Yasho Saboo, the founder of Ethos Watch Boutiques, a watch retailer in India, embarked on a campaign to grow his business beyond the single store he had opened in 2003 in his hometown, Chandigarh, a city of 1.2 million in northern India.
In those early days, however, Mr. Saboo was surrounded by naysayers.
“I was very often told, ‘You’re being too idealistic; this is going to fail,’” Mr. Saboo, now the chairman of Ethos, said in a phone interview last month from his home in Chandigarh. “Even the mall owners would say, ‘You really think a watch store with expensive watches is going to work?’”
Now Mr. Saboo and his son, Pranav, the chief executive of Ethos, preside over a network of 64 watch boutiques in 26 cities around India, including multibrand Ethos stores and monobrand stores that the company manages for the likes of Rolex, Omega and Jaeger-LeCoultre.
“Over the next 12 months, we are slated to open 20 to 21 more stores,” Mr. Saboo said. “And in early 2026, we’ll probably see the opening of our 100th store.”
Ethos’s expansion has not occurred in a vacuum. Over the past few years, while many Swiss watch executives have been preoccupied with the ups and downs of the Chinese market, India has quietly emerged as the industry’s next big growth opportunity.
In July, Deloitte Switzerland published a special report on the country, calling it “a lucrative frontier for Swiss watchmakers.”
While the vast majority of India’s 1.4 billion people make less than $1,000 a month, there is a significant slice of the population that can still afford five- and six-figure Swiss watches. That is especially true in light of the relatively low cost of living, Cyrille Vigneron, the chief executive of Cartier, said during a press briefing at the Watches and Wonders fair in Geneva in April. (Mr. Vigneron left the role Sept. 1 to become the chairman of Cartier Culture & Philanthropy.)
“You can have a salary that looks rather moderate in Europe, but as far as their rent is low, service is low and food is low, then what they can afford is quite high,” Mr. Vigneron said.
And the number of affluent Indians is expected to continue to rise, reaching 100 million people by 2027 from around 60 million in 2023, according to a Goldman Sachs Research report published earlier this year, piquing even more interest among Swiss watchmakers.
“India is clearly a focus,” Karine Szegedi, a managing partner at Deloitte Switzerland, said last month in a video interview from her office in Geneva. “People have the feeling that if they don’t go now, they’ll miss out.”
From January to July of this year, Swiss watch exports to India were up 20 percent compared with the same period in 2023, and up more than 41 percent compared with the same period in 2022, according to the Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry.
Values, however, remain low compared with the United States, Switzerland’s No. 1 market. For the first seven months of this year, exports to the United States totaled 2.5 billion Swiss francs (about $2.94 billion). By contrast, exports to India totaled 139.5 million Swiss francs.
Ms. Szegedi said that within a decade, she expected India to be among Switzerland’s Top 10 export markets for watches (in 2023, the country ranked No. 22).
Positive Indicators Ahead
The booming Indian economy has been another cause for optimism. In its World Economic Outlook report, published in April, the International Monetary Fund projected India’s gross domestic product “to remain strong at 6.8 percent in 2024 and 6.5 percent in 2025, with the robustness reflecting continuing strength in domestic demand and a rising working-age population.”
The positive economic news, coupled with the prospect of reduced customs duties thanks to the signing in March of a free-trade agreement between India and the European Free Trade Association — which comprises Switzerland, Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway — has spurred many watchmakers to reconsider their strategies for India.
Historically, foreign luxury brands doing business in the country encountered numerous logistical challenges, including restrictions on direct investment, customs duties as high as 23 percent and a retail network dominated by small family-owned corner shops or market stalls. Also, most Indian watch buyers were choosing inexpensive timepieces made in India and marketed by local groups such as Titan, a 40-year-old brand owned jointly by the Tata Group, a sprawling conglomerate of 30 companies, and the Tamilnadu Industrial Development Corporation, a development agency of the Tamil Nadu state.
The Deloitte report said that the trade agreement, which is still being reviewed by the parliaments of the European countries, stands to “encourage independent brands that have not yet ventured into the Indian market to develop infrastructure and set up stores, while leading established brands to reinforce their marketing efforts and pursue strategies similar to those observed in other markets such as China.”
Indeed, many Swiss watchmakers are already there. Jean-Christophe Babin, the chief executive of Bulgari, said the brand had been establishing a bigger retail foothold in the country, especially in cities such as Mumbai and New Delhi.
“We have an aggressive boutique development plan in India,” Mr. Babin said on a video call in June. “I was in Mumbai a few months ago to open our first boutique in that city in Jio World Plaza, a brand-new mall belonging to Reliance, a company owned by the Ambani family. And our sales since we opened are extremely good.”
From the perspective of Mr. Saboo, who founded Ethos when luxury watches were often smuggled into the country by unscrupulous retailers intending to offer them tax-free, the high-end watch business in India has been transformed in the past two decades.
“There were always buyers for expensive watches, but it was not a legitimate business,” Mr. Saboo said. “At that time, import duties into India were much higher than they are today. Very expensive watches were almost impossible to sell because you’d pay so much duty.
“But over time, things started to change and we grew to more cities and started to add higher-priced brands in the portfolio. This coincided with the gradual reduction of import duties. Organized retail started to pick up. Consumers started to see the value of buying from nice stores, with nice displays and salespeople who could explain things.”
Watch Collectors Unite
Punit Mehta, a watch collector in Mumbai, said the absence of informed watch salespeople was one reason he was inspired in 2019 to create a small collectors group called the Bombay Watch Enthusiasts. His goal was to find people who would be interested in talking about watches and would want to connect socially.
“Lack of knowledge was the biggest thing,” Mr. Mehta said. “The guys didn’t know what they were selling.”
In 2021, Mr. Mehta teamed up with RedBar Group, a global watch collectors organization with headquarters in New York, and changed the name of his organization to RedBar India. The chapter now includes more than 500 members.
“Wherever you travel in India, you have one member within a 100-mile radius that you can meet,” he said. “If you’re in Bangalore tomorrow, you can find 20 watch collectors.”
During the pandemic lockdowns, the group met largely on video calls, where they heard from watchmakers including Maximilian Büsser, the founder of the independent brand MB&F, and had discussions on topics such as watch photography and Russian timepieces.
“We moved on to doing meets at restaurants and bars,” Mr. Mehta said. “We also do sessions at our homes. The other day, I called 20-odd guys to my place on a Sunday for breakfast. A lot of us are car enthusiasts also, so we went for a long drive, came back and talked watches.”
Mr. Mehta said he believed so strongly in the future of India’s watch community that in 2021 he co-founded a media platform called The Hour Markers with the watch journalist Karishma Karer. The company, which publishes watch-related content from an Indian perspective, operates a website and various print publications.
“I’ve seen the consumption of watch-related media by Indians increase drastically in the last five years,” Mr. Mehta said. “They’re not only looking at posts about rappers wearing big watches but they’re actually learning and reading about watches. The consumption may not be on par with America and China or even Europe, but year after year they’re seeing a major increase in per capita consumption of watches.”
Experts say the signs of India’s growing fascination with high-end timepieces are all around, with one obvious example being the Ambani wedding — when Anant Ambani, the younger son of India’s richest man, wed Radhika Merchant, his longtime girlfriend, in a lavish three-day ceremony in Mumbai in July (during the pre-wedding festivities, the groom was reported to have worn five Patek Philippes, two Richard Milles and an Audemars Piguet).
Rafiq Dossani, a senior economist at the RAND Corporation and a professor of policy analysis at the Pardee RAND Graduate School, both in Santa Monica, Calif., said that in addition to India’s economic momentum, he had noticed a change in mood among the country’s consumers on his most recent visit, in July.
“There’s definitely a sense of optimism about the future that was not there earlier,” Mr. Dossani, who was born in India, said on a video call last month from his office in Santa Monica.
“This new confidence is very good for watches because people can now make decisions confident that their income will not die out suddenly,” he said. “Buying a watch, which is expensive, or buying an apartment — they’re much more willing to do those things now.”
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