You may remember a post not so long ago about the Richemont Group buying back $500M worth of watches from their distribution chain, supposedly to stop them being dumped on the grey market. Well, in an unexpected turn of events, apparently Richemont have just bought Watchfinder & Co...
It doesn't take a genius to see where this might be going, does it?
I'm sure Richemont would say the two are unconnected, but seriously, it would be foolish to think that a company sitting on $500M of stock, which has just bought one of the biggest pre-owned dealers in the market isn't going to drip feed those watches into the system. Obviously they'll have to be careful about it, they don't want to flood the market and drive the price down, but playing the long game they should be able to dump quite a lot of the buy-back stock, and definitely recoup a lot of the costs incurred and at the same time they potentially get to influence the second hand value of their own (and perhaps even more importantly their competitors) watches.
It will be interesting to see what happens next...
No comments:
Post a Comment