Baselworld 2018 starts with the selection. But news jewelry are not lacking ♦ ︎
“The world is changing fast. Faced with this challenge, there are only two alternatives: to grow larger or to concentrate. We have chosen to concentrate”. The words of Sylvie Ritter, managing director of Baselworld, have opened the new edition, the number 101, of the great fair dedicated to luxury watches and jewelery. Indeed, more and more luxury, because if Baselworld 2017 counted 135,000 total visitors, down from 145,000 in 2016, in November the Mch group, which organizes the fair, announced that it would have halved the list of exhibitors and reduced the duration of the event, two day less, in response to the difficult phase recorded by the Swiss watchmaking players (the export of Swiss watches, however, after two years of crisis started to rise again at + 12.6% in the first few months of 2018). Baselworld also reduced the rental fee for the stands by 10%.
The result is that in Basel there are about 700 exhibitors, almost halved compared to 1,300 in 2017, when they had already fallen by 200 compared to 2016, but still the past year attracted 106 thousand buyers and 4,400 journalists (including those of gioiellis.com). And yet, if there are no more brands like Movado or Eberhard in watchmaking, there are always leading names like Rolex, Patek Philippe, the Swatch group with its many brands, some of which, like Omega. There is also the Lvmh group with Maison like Bulgari and Tag Heuer. And there are many top brands of jewelry, from fashion like Swarovski, or haute joaillerie with Graff, de Grisogono or Harry Winston, up to small Maison but with great creativity like Alessio Boschi, and the classic brands of Italian jewelry, Nanis, Giovanni Ferraris , Annamaria Cammilli, Picchiotti, Fope, Leo Pizzo, Casato, just to name a few. In short, Baselworld has lost weight, but still retains a lot of charm: the 101 years brings them well. We will tell the news in the next few days.
