Can Formula 1 Keep TAG Heuer in the Fast Lane?

LONDON — The Formula 1 season doesn’t start until mid-March, but already, TAG Heuer can feel the traction from a deal reportedly worth $1 billion, which made it the sport’s new official timekeeper and title sponsor of the Monaco Grand Prix.

“In January, we saw a double-digit increase in the number of people coming to our stores compared to the same period last year,” said TAG Heuer’s new chief executive Antoine Pin in an interview with The Business of Fashion ahead of the opening event for F1’s 75th anniversary season, held at London’s O2 arena last week.

The Swiss watchmaker’s role was made public January 6 by parent company LVMH, following an announcement last October that the French conglomerate had signed a multi-brand 10-year deal with F1’s owners Liberty Media. Alongside TAG Heuer’s timekeeping, Moët & Chandon become the sport’s official champagne while Louis Vuitton will provide trunks for race trophies among other activations. The role confirmed TAG Heuer’s emergence as the LVMH Watch Division’s darling.

Pin said it would take time before the impact the partnership would have on sales became clear. “The momentum is building up, but it’s still very early,” he said.

TAG Heuer’s new chief was appointed in September from LVMH stablemate Bulgari. He succeeds Julien Tornare, who moved over to Hublot after just 8 months in the job. The group’s watch division is headed by Frédéric Arnault, son of LVMH chairman Bernard.

TAG Heuer was first involved in F1 in the late 1960s and remains a sponsor of the Oracle Red Bull Racing Team and current F1 World Champion Max Verstappen. It last took care of timekeeping between 1992 and 2003. LVMH is understood to have outbid F1’s previous timekeeper Rolex, which had timed races for the past decade.

According to George Ciz, TAG Heuer’s chief marketing officer, who was present in the same interview, news of the deal has prompted a spike in social engagements, too. “Four years ago we were the number seven [watch] brand on Instagram,” he said. “Then we jumped to third by 2023, and last year we were second. In January, we were first, ahead of Rolex and Omega, and not by a small margin.”

Independent data backed up the claim. “TAG Heuer was the fastest growing brand on our benchmark panel, up 8 percent year-on-year in 2024,” said Benjamin Dubuc, innovation director and partner at Digital Luxury Group (DLG), a Geneva-based consultancy. Posts featuring Red Bull Racing, which TAG Heuer first partnered in 2016, and the Netflix racing series “Senna” performed particularly well.

“TAG Heuer’s posts averaged 20,000 likes per post, while competitors [Breitling, Longines and Tudor] averaged only 4,300 likes per post,” Dubuc said. “Engagement levels suggest a strong emotional connection to F1-driven content.” He noted that TAG Heuer’s Formula 1-driven social media strategy had resonated particularly well in the US, where its share of search demand was up 3 percent to record levels in December.

Ciz said he hadn’t invested heavily in directly promoting the brand on Instagram, but that the results stemmed from a high degree of natural interest in its activities with F1, the Automobile Club of Monaco and Senna Foundation. “We didn’t spend silly money on this: most of it was organic,” he said.

Surging interest in TAG Heuer comes at a time when the luxury watch industry is battling strong headwinds. Exports are down and many brands have put staff on short-hours contracts as retailers reduce orders in a bid to offset swelling inventories.

TAG Heuer, however, may already be bucking the trend. LVMH does not publish revenues by brand, but according to Morgan Stanley’s influential Swiss watch report, published this month, last year TAG Heuer was one of only a handful of luxury watchmakers to increase sales. The report’s estimates indicated TAG Heuer’s revenues climbed 9 percent to 670 million Swiss francs against an industry average of -2.4 percent. Pin declined to confirm Morgan Stanley’s figures, but said they were close to actual.

While Pin said this made him “cautiously optimistic”, he wasn’t making any big forecasts. “You would expect that the developments you’re making are having a positive impact on your business,” he said. “But on the other hand, we know we’re not in the best economic conditions.”

He continued: “The beauty of this deal is that it’s a 10-year deal. The complexity for us is to maintain constant pressure and to think long-term. This industry doesn’t adjust to the ups and downs of the economy overnight. So you are balancing between the optimism of this major decision to go back into F1 and the positive impact it should have on our business, and on the other end, being conservative in terms of the economic fundamentals where basically you’re not sure that people will have more disposable income in 2025 than in 2024.”

Research suggests it’s a good time to be on the roster of F1 sponsors. A report released in December by Nielsen Sports, the sports measurement and analytics agency, indicated that F1 is now the most followed sports series in the world with a global TV audience of 1.5 billion. Since 2021, global interest in F1 has added roughly 50 million new fans, according to the report, making it the fastest growing annual sports competition in the world.

For TAG Heuer, the partnership may yet be measured against the US market, which Pin confirmed is TAG Heuer’s largest, adding that the Americas, including F1 hotspots Brazil and Mexico, account for one third of the company’s total revenues.

In recent years, Formula 1 has grown in popularity in the US on the back of the Netflix series “Drive to Survive”, while new races in Miami and Las Vegas have pulled in big crowds and record TV audiences. Race weekend attendance at the Miami Grand Prix last year increased to 275,000 from 243,000, and the race attracted the largest ever F1 US TV audience in the sport’s history, according to organisers.

The US is by far Swiss watchmaking’s largest market, and still growing. The Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry (FHS) recorded export values to the US of 4.4 billion Swiss francs in 2024, up 5 percent on 2023 and 12.4 percent on 2022, record years for the industry as the pandemic bounce kicked in.

“It’s a good equation,” admitted Pin. “Everything is fitting together. And these new [US] races bring the same glamour you find in Monaco, so the ingredients are there that make really bubbling moments. Hopefully we should take advantage of that.”

China, by comparison, remains in a slump and after years of decline now accounts for Swiss watch exports valued at 2 billion Swiss francs, down 26 percent year-on-year in 2024 alone, according to the FHS.

Pin says TAG Heuer is “under-represented in China compared to the industry” and that it still has to “prove itself” in the country. Next month, F1 will return to China for the first time since 2019.

“We’re clearly a very small player [in China] compared to the rest of the world,” he says. “It’s not in our top 10. We came late to China and when we did, in the late 2000s, we were impatient and tried to do too much. Sports watches were not prized there, but the market has changed and the Grand Prix is an opportunity for us to express what we are properly.”

TAG Heuer has yet to announce how it will activate the partnership on race weekends, but Ciz said the pitlane exit would have a 1.2-metre TAG Heuer clock and that an LVMH steering group had been set up to coordinate VIP experiences. He said the group would be taking around 120 people to each race weekend.

But Ciz said TAG Heuer’s multi-layered involvement in the sport would provide it with unique storytelling opportunities. “What makes us different from any other partner is that we have a partnership with a circuit [Monaco], with the world champion Max Verstappen, and with Red Bull Racing,” he said. “We have the nirvana moment, where you have the competition and the best athlete in it.”

According to Pin, TAG Heuer will invest nearly 20 percent of its revenues in marketing this year, in keeping with the brand’s historic average. “We’re not just supervising the race, we’re engaged in the competition,” he said. “The emotion of winning is super important to us. We’ll make a lot of buzz, but it’s a marathon we’re running. It can’t be that we do something for one season and then repeat ourselves. It won’t be business as usual year-on-year.”

Pin said F1 would be used to promote each of the company’s five current model families, including the Formula 1 typically the company’s entry-level product line. At LVMH Watch Week last month, TAG Heuer added new chronographs to the Formula 1 collection, priced around $5,000, and it is expected to introduce a more accessible line at Watches and Wonders Geneva, the industry’s largest annual watch fair, which takes place in the first week of April. Pin also said a new version of TAG Heuer’s Connected luxury smartwatch would be released later this year and that the company would be looking to leverage its historic timekeeping technology in the future.

While the industry has been moving to a low-volume, high-value model, Pin said he was ambitious to increase his company’s volumes, contradicting the current industry trend. FHS figures show that last year, export volumes plummeted by almost 10 percent and that Switzerland now exports half as many watches as in 2011. Meanwhile, average export values have more than doubled over the past decade.

“If you give up and say it’s just going to be super expensive products, you’re battling for very few people,” said Pin. “We need to have everybody on board with this, all stakeholders. But it won’t be easy. Everything is leading toward quite high underlying inflation.” A strong Swiss franc and the rising price of gold have been a constant headache for Swiss watchmakers.

Pin will be hoping the F1 partnership is the fuel that revs up his business. “There is a matter of pride that we’re back in Formula 1,” he said. “There’s a sense that we are home.”

Disclosure: LVMH is part of a group of investors who, together, hold a minority interest in The Business of Fashion. All investors have signed shareholders’ documentation guaranteeing BoF’s complete editorial independence.