How Many Watches Does Rolex Make a Year?

How many watches does Rolex make a year?

Rolex, as you know, has a lot of mystique to it. Rolex is very secretive as a company and discloses no more information about its operations than it has to. This is, of course, possible since Rolex is a privately owned company and has no investors and others who demand get detailed information about the company and its operations.

This secretive way of operating business has given Rolex a rather mystical aura over it and leaves much room for speculation.

One such topic is how many watches Rolex makes per year. In this article, we will look closer at this topic and try to answer it.

How many watches does Rolex make a year?

We want to begin by saying this: Today, Rolex does not disclose how many watches they manufacture per year. So that’s that. But the fact of the matter is that it has not always been like that. Well, technically, Rolex has not disclosed its production numbers for a long time, but there have been other ways the public has been able to access this information.

All Rolex watches are certified Chronometers, which have to go through tough and stringent tests of the Contrôle Officiel Suisse des Chronomètres, the Official Swiss Chronometer Testing Institut. From 2016 and onwards, COSC does no longer publish the exact figure of watches from each watch brand which COSC has certified. This was after a request from the brands to protect their confidentiality. However, 2015 is the last year that the numbers were published officially. Since all Rolex watches Arte certified chronometers, it allowed us to know how many Rolex watches were made per year by looking at the number of watches that COSC tested per year from Rolex.

And by looking at this data, we can see that in 2015, 795,716 watches from Rolex were certified. So the last year of the official data, Rolex made roughly 800,000 watches. Now, the catch is that this was a while ago, and things have naturally changed since then. Any numbers that are thrown around are speculation and estimates.

However, the general consensus is that Rolex manufactures between 800,000 and 1 million watches per year. Some people estimate that Rolex makes more than one million watches per year, but again, this is not confirmed.

If we are going to go back in time, Rolex manufactured about 90.0000 timepieces per year in the 1960s. Towards the end of the 1960s, Rolex manufactured about 150,000-20,0000 watches per year.

Rolex’s production output grew even stronger in the 1970s as the brand grew stronger and increased in popularity. In the 1970s, Rolex manufactured about 350,000–400,000 watches per year.  In the 1980s, the company reached a manufacturing output of about half a million watches per year.

The fact is that it was easier to estimate the annual production of Rolex timepieces when Rolex used random serial numbers for its timepieces, and each timepiece was thus consecutively numbered. 

In about 2010 (Rolex made no announcement, thus the time varies between late 2009 and late 2010), Rolex started implementing a new format for the serial numbers used for their watches. Today, Rolex uses random serial numbers which thus makes it impossible to know the production output by looking at the serial numbers.

Conclusion

There is no longer a way to know for sure how many watches Rolex makes per year. The only way we would know for sure how many watches Rolex makes is from a public announcement from Rolex, but based on how Rolex runs its business, this is unlikely.

With an estimated output of 800 thousand to one million watches per year, however, it’s safe to say that Rolex watches are mass-produced. At the same time, with that output, it is impressive that the vast majority of timepieces are made with no flaws. Rolex has really succeeded in its quality control.