Waching daily Apr 4 2017

For Bulgari, Basel is an extraordinary platform once a year to

meet with all people who are important

for us in watchmaking that is, obviously,

first and foremost, our wholesale retailers, there are more than six hundred,

so they are very important people as they distribute Bulgari, which means sales,

and also the image and perceived quality of the brand.

Then obviously media: it's the main media meeting around watchmaking every year,

so it's firstly a celebration of the art of Swiss watchmaking,

but also for Bulgari a great platform to communicate some of our more impactful news.

We have in Switzerland more than 400 people who are daily involved in watchmaking,

therefore on Sunday many of them will come not only to discover the fair itself

but to see how we really display and showcase the fantastic things they are crafting.

Plus obviously all the employees coming often from Europe or Italy.

So for Bulgari 2017, there are three main families we are innovating,

who are the pillars of Bulgari watches, that is: Serpenti, LVCEA, and Octo.

And for Basel the main focus is on Serpenti and Octo.

So Serpenti will be really a "milestone" innovation, for the first time ever we'll present

a leather strap Serpenti, , which is not exactly normal leather,

it's a doubled twill Karung which allows really the watch to be extremely comfortable, extremely easy to wear,

and very importantly easy also to change as we are offering a very broad

combination of colored straps, of colored dyes: in total with have more than 300 combinations

which you can choose from an app.

So I would say it's the first ever customized luxury watch.

Then on Octo, Octo is really the iconic elegant men's watch for Bulgari,

very contemporary,

we go one step further to reach for time mastery,

with the Octo Automatic Finissimo

Very creatively our watchmakers have managed to get to a concept which is micro-rotor,

to keep the thinness of Octo and to have it automatic,

so 60 hours power reserve which is

a world-first for a very thin watch and only 42 grams as we have obviously imported from the Minute Repeater

the great aesthetics, the stealth look of the Minute Repeater into the Automatic watch.

Insofar we are only three months into the new year so the first quarter

is strong, I would say as it is. Overall and on all our business units

we are registering growth, so we are quite confident for the rest of the year

as the first quarter is very much in line with the last quarter of 2016,

which had been very good also. I would say that all indicators are rather green right now

and will go full speed to sign and post another historic year for Bulgari.