Hong Kong was the Swiss watch industry’s No. 1 export market for more than a decade.Not anymore. “It is the end of El Dorado,” Thierry Huron, founder of The Mercury Project, a Swiss watch and jewelry consultancy, wrote in an email.With its tourism-driven sales dented by pro-democracy demonstrations in 2019 and then blocked entirely by a coronavirus-related ban on tourist arrivals, Hong Kong lost half its watch and jewelry sales between 2018 and 2021, according to the July edition of the Sell-Out Index, Mr. Huron’s monthly report.The report, based on the Hong Kong Census and Statistics Department database, showed …
