Swiss luxury watchmaker Tag Heuer is riding India’s growing middle class to bet that localized retail sales can offset a falling global appetite for high-end Swiss timepieces. The LVMH-owned brand plans to open boutique shops rather than rely on third-party distributors to shore up sales in a volatile luxury market.
As parent LVMH struggles with a profit slide, India’s demand for Swiss watches has defied the downturn, surging more than 26% early this year. Tag Heuer, with its move into Noida this week, hopes that this will make India the leader across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa in five years.
The push stems from consumers increasingly preferring local boutiques to duty-free shopping trips. This ‘buy-at-home’ trend is helping global brands firm up investments in physical stores in Delhi, Mumbai, and Bengaluru, even though they remain cautious about scaling.
Yet, Indians are still stuck at entry-level watches, where sales are at €3,000, about 25% below Tag’s global average. The Swiss major is keen on converting these first-time buyers into long-term collectors of high-end watches.
“India, for the last three years, has been working very well. Last year we decided to start back the retail journey in order to be well positioned for the next years,” Guillaume Boilot, managing director, EMEA, Tag Heuer, told Mint.
Along with this brand, LVMH group’s watch portfolio includes Hublot and Zenith.
India’s luxury watch market has been gaining ground even as global demand remains uneven. Swiss watches also outperformed, reaching about ₹3,500 crore from ₹3,244.6 crore in 2024, according to the Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry (FH).
Boilot said India is already an important market for the company within the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region and is expected to become its largest market in the region, both in volume and value.
India still a mid-luxury market
For now, however, India remains largely an entry and mid-segment luxury watch market for the brand, rather than a major contributor to its highest-end watch business.
“For the time being, it’s more on the mid-level segment for us than really higher. But as soon as we manage to meet these people, to understand and to discuss with these people, we manage to have some high-end value,” Boilot said.
That reflects a wider pattern in India’s luxury market, where many consumers are entering global brands through more accessible products before gradually moving up the value chain.
The company estimates the average age of its buyers globally and in India at around 35, though this varies by collection. The strongest demand in India is coming for men’s watches in the 38-42 mm range, with black and blue dials remaining the most popular across the industry. In India, younger, more affluent consumers are increasingly gravitating towards recognisable, sportier products and visible premium categories such as watches, sneakers and leather goods, he added.
Even as it expands, the company does not want to scale too aggressively.
“It’s not a race to open boutiques. We will build nimbly,” Boilot said. Instead, the company plans to build city by city, keeping in mind how sharply luxury buying behaviour can differ across Indian markets.
“It is very important to understand this market and to be sure that we don’t just do a copy-paste from what we do in Switzerland or what we do in Dubai. It could work in Delhi, but maybe it’s different in Bengaluru,” he said.
That localisation, he said, will be central to building a durable business in India, where tastes, spending behaviour and luxury awareness can vary widely across regions.
Impact of the war
Boilot added that the West Asia war has not materially disrupted the company’s India business or its supply chain so far, although he said it was still too early to assess any wider fallout on the region. “For India, it was a little bit more difficult in the first days of the conflict in the Middle East, but now it’s fine,” he said.
He added that freight cost inflation has had only a limited impact on the business because watches are compact, high-value products and less exposed to logistics pressures than bulkier categories.
According to the Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry (FH), India was the 17th-largest market for Swiss watch sales in January and February 2026, at about €56.7 million, up more than 26% year-on-year. Even so, it remains far behind larger developed markets such as the US and China. In the first two months of the year, US consumers bought about €822.4 million worth of Swiss watches, while Chinese buyers purchased about €325.8 million.