Q: Could you please briefly introduce yourself?
A: Graduated from Michigan State university and went to work for Caterpillar. After moving from Caterpillar, started out as regional sales manager for Tissot, and a year later was asked to take over responsibility for Omega. In 1996, was asked to be responsible for both Omega and Blancpain in China.

Q: Do you find it hard to balance both?
A: In certain ways, it is more work. There are two sales teams, two market plans etc. But sometimes working with two, gives you a bit more authority in your relationship with your customers. You have to have a very flexible mind, nearly a split personality. Both brands are unique and have certain personality traits that you have to be able to identify with. It’s like trying to write two books at the same time.

Q: Can you give us some background of Blancpain?
A: Blancpain was created in 1735, by Jean Jacques Blancpain, and is the oldest existing watch brand in the world that is still in existence. Blancpain has not jumped at the quartz revolution in the watch making industry and its logo for a long time has been, since 1735, Blancpain has never made a quartz watch and it never will”. Blancpain is also the only brand that makes all of the 6 complications of mechanical watches. Many make 2 or 3, but no brand has hired the staff, trained the staff and developed the skills internally to where they can do all of them together. The design is very simple by definition: the concept of Blancpain is to put all the effort and concentration on what is inside, and the outside to be very practical, functional and of the highest quality, which is why Blancpain has never made a square watch. This might not be as interesting as where advertising is concerned, but traditionally all watches were round. Imagine any pocket watch you have ever seen, and it was round. If you ever ask someone to draw a watch, nearly every person will draw a round one.

There are watch brands that mass produce 10 or 20 million watches a year. Then there are mass-luxury watches that make maybe 250000 watches a year such as Longines and Omega. This product is still quite expensive, but they use different approaches to sell the quantity that they do. Then you have the very exclusive end of the industry. This is where Blancpain falls into category. These brands usually produce about 5000 to 15000 watches a year, and Blancpain produces around 8000 a year. There are a couple of reasons why the quantity is so low. Firstly, they are very expensive watches, so there is a limited amount of which people wish to purchase. Secondly, very skilled technicians make these and the Swiss watch industry is working at full tilt by producing small quantities of highly complicated watches each year. There are no robots doing this, so you cannot push them into overtime and jeopardize the quality of the watch.

Q: How does Blancpain compete against its competitors?
A: It has to be creative. Nobody wants to spend a large amount of money on a watch that they do not feel is unique or outstanding in some way. So you have to keep reinventing the product with new concepts, new designs, new variations, etc. It’s not only technical at this level; it’’s also very artistic. It’s a fusion between technology and art. Most products tend to be either very functional or very impractical from a design point of view, and the challenge for Blancpain is to combine the two successfully.

Some of competitors assemble expensive watches, but they don’t actually make what is inside. They buy the different components, something that sets Blancpain apart from these companies. Blancpain is a very vertically integrated company, and from beginning to end, it is a complete product.

Q: Why did Blancpain choose China?
A: To invest in China is an easy thing to decide eventually. But in 1996 not many of the brands in this price-range were showing an interest and I think we realized the potential of the market before many of our competitors. Sales have been tough in the early years, but you have to start somewhere. If you wait too long, then your competitors are already so far ahead of you, so it becomes worse.

Q: What is Shanghai’s’ position in this market?
A: Shanghai is an important market, but for luxury items, it’s’ not the most important market. What we have seen over the years is that the Shanghainese are very practical, so they tend to be very rational when it comes to purchasing products. They do not tend to invest in impractical goods. In other parts of the country in particular the northeast, they tend to be very emotional with their purchasing, something which shows in the market.

Q: How important is the Chinese market overall in Blancpain?
A: Traditionally the Japanese market has been the biggest market in the world for watches. Just by force of numbers, and as the economy develops more, China will be the biggest market in the world. You just have to look at markets like Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore; the Chinese are a major consumer group wherever they are. In time, it will be the most important market in the world.

Q: How do you keep up to date with technology?
A: If there is new equipment on the market, better tools and something that can improve the quality of our products, of course we adopt new measures. But what hasn’t changed is the fact that it is still all hand-made and assembled. We want to defend the heritage of the industry and improve it, respecting what it really does represent.

Q: It was reported that the amount of China’s imported watches from Switzerland has increased to USD 14.5million for the first 4 months this year. How do you see China’s accession to the WTO affecting your business/industry?
A: I think that, in the whole, it has to be good. Our products really rely on people with enough wealth to afford them, and the WTO will definitely help improve that. There will be more investment, more business and more people earning money, so from that point of view it can really only be good. On the other hand, we were one of the early starters in this business, and the WTO will make it much easier for our competitors to enter the market. They are going to come in and not have to face the same obstacles that we faced upon entering China. They will be able to learn from our mistakes. There is little doubt that we will lose a share of the market, but I think that we can maintain a better position than we would otherwise have if we hadn’t entered the market so early.

A: We think that we might be able to double our output as the market grows, and we have invested a significant amount of money into this. The reason we can do this, is that we are seeing a bigger geographical area that we can serve. This would still only mean approx 15000 watches, and it would remain an exclusive product.