Are analog watches making a comeback? What the numbers say

Ask anyone who follows watches and the answer comes fast: yes, of course. Auction records make the news and collectors under thirty argue about references at one in the morning. The mechanical watch looks like it won its long fight with the screen. The export figures are less flattering. Switzerland shipped 5.2 million mechanical wristwatches in 2025, against 7.2 million in 2019. Whatever came back, it was not volume. Read those numbers next to the smartwatch market, which had its own bad year in 2024, and another picture appears. Neither object won. Each one quietly changed jobs.

The count: fewer mechanical watches every year

Start with the figure nobody quotes at dinner. The Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry, the FH, publishes export statistics each month. It splits them between mechanical and electronic watches, in units as well as in francs. Exports stand in for sales (the FH says so itself on every release), but over six years the trend is hard to argue with.

Source: FH, Swiss watch exports January to December 2025. The mechanical share of units barely moved, from 35% in 2019 to 36% in 2025. Mechanical watches did not take ground from quartz. Both shrank, at almost the same speed.

2025 was also the second year in a row of decline by value, down 1.7% after 2.8% in 2024, with exports to China down by more than a third in two years. A comeback that loses two million units in six years would be an odd sort of comeback.

The price: the same object became a different one

Divide value by units and the story turns. The average Swiss mechanical wristwatch left the country at about 2,365 francs in 2019. In 2025 the figure was about 4,009 francs. These are export prices, and an average hides a lot, but the direction is plain: Switzerland makes fewer mechanical watches and asks much more for each.

Part of that is the franc, and part is gold, which the FH says reached record highs in 2025. Most of it is mix. Watches below 500 francs at export price fell 4.5% last year, more than twice the drop of those above 3,000 francs. The cheap mechanical watch, the one people bought because they needed to know the time, is the one fading out.

Meanwhile, the smartwatch had its own bad year

If analog watches were losing a war to screens, the screens should have been winning. In 2024 they were not. Counterpoint Research counted the first decline in global smartwatch shipments since the category existed, down 7%, with Apple Watch shipments down 19%.

2025 brought a rebound of 4%, and with it the same climb the Swiss figures show. Counterpoint reports average selling prices up 5% and shipments of smartwatches under $200 down 9%. The band between $200 and $400 grew by almost half.

Two markets, one direction. People buy fewer cheap things for their wrist and pay more for the ones they keep. The luxury houses noticed, and mostly declined to build a smartwatch of their own; our piece on whether Rolex makes a smartwatch looks at who tried and who stayed out.

The mechanical watch no longer has to tell anyone the time. That is exactly why people still pay for one.

What came back: a reason to wear one

Take time-telling away from a mechanical watch and very little practical reason remains. The phone tells the time. The smartwatch tells the time plus your heart rate and the next meeting. So the people still buying a mechanical watch in 2026 buy it for something else, an object made to outlast its owner, or the small pleasure of a movement you can hear in a quiet room. Our piece on why Gen Z buys mechanical watches follows the youngest of them.

That shift explains the price curve better than any campaign. A tool competes on price. An object chosen for what it means competes on meaning, which has no obvious ceiling, and occasionally on hype, which has a very obvious one (our field guide to FOMO has the charts). The cheap mechanical watch suffers most because it was the last one still pretending to be a tool.

Here is what the comeback stories skip. Nothing in either set of figures says people traded one object for the other. Both markets lost their cheap end. Both kept the buyers willing to pay for something specific, and a good share of those buyers want the two at once: the watch for what it means, the smartwatch for what it measures.

Two jobs, one wrist

That leaves a practical problem no export table can show. A mechanical watch bought for its meaning wants to be worn every day, or it turns into a drawer object. A smartwatch bought for health data wants daily wear too, or the data fills with holes. Two daily objects, and one comfortable place to put them.

Some people split them across two wrists, a habit with a longer history than it looks; our piece on wearing two watches traces it back. Others rotate, and lose either the watch or the data on alternate days. The single-wrist version needs a structure that holds both, and that structure is the Smartlet.

The Smartlet is a modular metal link bracelet that replaces the straps of both watches. Two watch adapters seat in the lug holes of the mechanical watch, in place of the spring bars, and the bracelet sides lock into them. The mechanical watch stays on top of the wrist. The smartwatch sits underneath, in the central part of the bracelet, where a clasp would normally be. One runs on a mainspring and the other on a battery, a difference our piece on power reserve and battery life takes seriously.

It covers lug widths from 18 to 24 mm on watches with standard spring bars, and the Apple Watch adapters in both sizes come in the box. Check your watch on the compatibility pages, then see how the pairing works day to day in our guide to an Apple Watch and a mechanical watch on the same wrist.

So, is it a comeback?

By volume, no. Switzerland exports 28% fewer mechanical watches than in 2019, and the line has not turned. By value, yes. The value side also tells you who is buying: fewer people paying more for a watch they have no practical need for. Call it a promotion rather than a comeback.

The smartwatch went through its own version in 2024 and came out as a premium health device; our short history of the smartwatch follows how it got there. The two objects stopped competing for the same job some time ago, as our comparison of mechanical watches and smartwatches argues. They still compete for the same wrist.

Smartlet, the modular metal bracelet awarded at the Concours Lepine 2025 and shown at CES 2026, gives them one wrist to share. Discover the Smartlet One.