Swatch Partner Hengdeli Says China Golden Week Sales Rise 50%

Oct. 10 (Bloomberg) -- Hengdeli Holdings Ltd., the retail partner of Swatch Group AG in China, said sales for the first three days of China’s weeklong holiday rose 50 percent.

“We saw a lot of customers snapping up the big-ticket items earlier as they realize those are in limited supply,” Stan Lee, a vice president at Hengdeli, said in a phone interview today in Hong Kong. Products sold included Breguet, Jaeger-LeCoultre, and A. Lange & Sohne watches priced at more than HK$500,000 ($64,000), he said.

The distributor of Omega and Breguet brands operates more than 300 stores in the mainland, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, Lee said. Hengdeli made 68 percent of last year’s sales in mainland China, with 29 percent coming from Hong Kong.

An average of 110,769 visitors from the mainland arrived in Hong Kong each day from Oct. 1 to 7 during the week-long holiday in China known as the Golden Week, according to government data.

Hengdeli fell 0.8 percent to HK$2.59 as of 10:25 a.m. in Hong Kong trading and has lost 44 percent this year, compared with a 24 percent decline for the benchmark Hang Seng Index.

Editors: Frank Longid

To contact Bloomberg News staff for this story: Michelle Yun in Hong Kong at +852-2977-4643 or myun11@bloomberg.net

--Editor: Frank Longid

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Frank Longid at flongid@bloomberg.net