STATE OF THE NATION: The financial breakdown of the top brands in the UK

Who are the biggest movers and shakers operating in the UK watch industry at brand level? Watch Insider has been crunching years’ worth of data from the biggest brands and groups across the UK to find out exactly how the landscape of the UK watch market looks. We’ve looked at turnover and operating profit as the key metrics, and drawn comparisons over time, as well as between competing brands. We’ve compiled the results below, which make for fascinating reading. 

To track the top and bottom lines of all those watch brands and groups operating in the United Kingdom has been an eye-opening project. If anything, this latest installment in the ‘State of the Nation’ series of reports comes with more caveats and asterisks than the previous one that looked into the financial performance of the UK’s leading jewellers and watch retailers.

This is because the power at an individual brand level lies in the hands of a relatively small number of key players, the majority of which are part of a group. So, the financial results for that group don’t give us the specific brand-by-brand breakdown that would give us a definitive list, without relying on third party estimations from the likes of Morgan Stanley.

Not only do a lot of the companies listed represent multiple brands, but in the case of some brands — Cartier and Bulgari spring to mind — there’s a split between jewellery and watches. That led to an arbitrary decision based on estimates to keep Cartier in the analysis but to exclude Bulgari. This is based on Cartier being more of a significant player in watches, despite the majority of its sales being from jewellery. Cartier reports its UK financial figures separately from Richemont.

In the case of Casio, the issue becomes even more complex, given the multi-faceted nature of its operation. When crunching numbers for watch sales, it’s difficult to rummage through sales figures that also include calculators, musical instruments, cash registers, and printers. Again, it’s an arbitrary decision to not include them in the analysis for this reason.

Unsurprisingly, Rolex is, far and away, the biggest player in the market. It’s true that its sales figures include Tudor as well — itself a powerhouse in Swiss watchmaking — but it would still be number one by a country mile on its own. As a group it reported sales of over £700 million for the year ended 31 December 2024, with that figure almost certainly closer to £750 million now.

This brings us onto another caveat with the comparisons in this report. Companies file their accounts at different times, and they don’t all share the same fiscal year. In the above example, we have the financials for ‘Rolex Watch Company’ up to the end of 2024, but we have other financial results for as recent as 31 March this year. This makes it difficult to make a comprehensive like-for-like comparison.

One specific observation that comes out of this report is that the companies with the biggest turnovers fluctuate far less than those with lower sales. A company like Movado Group — with annual sales of less than £30 million — has seen annual turnover go down, then up, then down again, then up again, all since Covid. Whereas companies like Rolex and Patek Philippe (with the exception of the 2020 Covid year) have seen unrelenting growth.

Understandably, operating profit is a lot less consistent. This is due to a number of factors, including: accounting tricks for the benefit of tax efficiency; re-investment (especially for those brands opening their own bricks and mortar stores); tax and/or regulation changes that increase costs in a way that are outside the control of the company. In this report, Bremont stands out as being one of the more volatile brands on this metric, becoming briefly profitable for one year in 2021, before losing almost £14 million in 2023, and reducing those losses to just shy of £10 million in its most recent reporting year. At the other extreme is Citizen — which includes Citizen, Bulova, Frederiqe Constant, and Alpina — which has recorded increasing profits in all but one year since 2020.

As discussed previously in Watch Insider, there is some evidence that the strength of the big Japanese watchmakers — Citizen, Seiko, and Casio — is coming at the expense of some of their more established Swiss counterparts (albeit this is also factoring in global sales data, as Casio hasn’t been included in this UK round-up, as mentioned above). As sales from these three have risen, the likes of Breitling (filed under its new ‘House of Brands’ moniker), Swatch Group, and LVMH have seen turnover cooling.

In conclusion, this edition of Watch Insider’s State of the Nation series should be seen as a report of broad brush strokes, rather than of nuance and specifics. As seen above, with a few exceptions it’s very difficult to drill down on exact numbers for the majority of the brands that make up the top 10 or 15 in the UK, in sales terms. But trends over time are revealing and real, and it’s fairly clear for which brands all the momentum is in a positive direction, and vice versa.

NOTE: Accounts published at Companies House do not always paint a fully accurate picture of a company’s performance. Businesses can legally organise their accounts in a way that makes them more tax efficient, for instance, especially for global businesses that have UK subsidiaries. This is why we’ve focused on annual turnover and annual operating profit in this report. These are the two most reliable indicators because there is very little book cooking that can affect these figures. Plus showing data over a number of years helps to weed out statistical anomalies.

This article was first published in the July 2026 edition of Watch Insider.