Why are Rolex watches so expensive and hard to find? The Swiss luxury brand is said to make one million timepieces per year, but tracking one down is a challenge

Jan 3 , 2022

A Rolex Submariner watch paired with blue bracelets. Photo: Shutterstock

The pandemic may have briefly disrupted the luxury watch market, but Rolex is still raking in millions from its iconic Daytonas, Submariners, Oysters and Datejusts

As the brand’s watches are all handmade at just four ateliers, scarcity may be inevitable – or is it all a ploy to lead the resale market alongside Patek Philippe?

Rolex makes some of the world’s most iconic watches, like the Daytona, Submariner and classic Oyster. The Swiss company is believed to make roughly one million timepieces per year, each one by hand. But new Rolexes can be hard to find for a buyer without an established relationship with an authorised distributor.

Although the supply of Rolex watches may have briefly been disrupted by production and supply chain problems at the peak of the coronavirus pandemic, that’s not the reason they’re so hard to find – or so expensive when you do locate one.

It’s all about the Rolex business model

A Rolex Datejust displayed at the Baselworld watch and jewellery fair in Basel, Switzerland, in March 2018. Photo: Reuters

The issues of the past two years are a mere blip compared with larger trends happening in the luxury watch market generally and with Rolex specifically, Adam Golden of Menta Watches said.

“Rolex seems to have structured their business in such a way that they’re controlling distribution and who gets what, at a retail level,” he said. A decade ago most models were available on-demand from authorised dealers (ADs) of the brand, he explained.

Rolex did not respond to request for comment on this story, but when Yahoo Finance covered the shortage, the company broke its characteristic silence to say that “the scarcity of our products is not a strategy on our part”.

The statement also pointed out that all Rolex watches are assembled by hand at one of its four locations in Switzerland, a process that “naturally restricts our production capacities”.

Watchmakers at a Rolex restoration atelier in Geneva, doing work that demands absolute concentration. Photo: Rolex

On a visit to a dealer in Florida this Summer, Golden said there was just one Rolex available to buy – a ladies’ Datejust that a customer had ordered and then cancelled.

But Golden says watches are still flowing to the brand’s preferred ADs, and that the backlog is more illusion than reality, as Rolex is generally believed to produce as many as a million watches per year.

“Rolex would like to perpetuate the image that there’s a shortage and that there’s such high demand that they can’t produce enough to satisfy the demand, but I think in reality it’s just very controlled release in order to keep that demand super high,” he said.