​​​​​​​Swiss industry grows ever more specialised

Swiss industry is moving aver more towards specialised sectors like watches and pharmaceuticals. © Keystone / Gaetan Bally

The Covid-19 pandemic is likely to further accelerate Swiss industry’s move towards specialisation in a small group of high added-value sectors, says a new report.

Out of every ten francs of Swiss industrial revenue in 2019, four came from just two industries: pharmaceuticals and watches and electronics, according to the studyExternal link by independent think-tank Avenir Suisse. This is twice as much as in 1997.

Instead of a rise in unemployment, there has been a shift in the job market, it notes. The widely held fear that Switzerland’s “workshop” would be outsourced to other countries has not been borne out. Industrial value creation is ever more dependent on services such as maintenance and digital solutions, trends that are likely to accelerate in the wake of the Covid-19 crisis.

Avenir Suisse notes that over the past two decades, the industrial sector has specialised in those areas where value creation and productivity were most important. For the authors, this is the only possible way for Swiss industry, which is geared towards exports, to be competitive on an international scale.

“Swiss industry has achieved these successes without an interventionist industrial policy like those of some of its neighbours,” they write. “Costly and inefficient state intervention would thus be unwise as it would halt technological progress in our internationalised economy.”