Harry Winston jewels have adorned many a leading lady, including Gwyneth Paltrow, when she took home an Oscar. Awards shows may look different in the future now that Swatch is buying the iconic jeweler for $1 billion. (AP)
Harry Winston is getting hitched again.
The ultra-swanky diamond merchant — whose Hollywood clientele through the decades has included Elizabeth Taylor, Sharon Stone and Jessica Alba — is being sold for $1 billion to Swatch, the world’s largest watch maker.
The deal, which includes $750 million in cash plus the assumption of $250 million in debt, ends more than a year of speculation about who might scoop up the 70-year-old jeweler, immortalized by Marilyn Monroe in the song “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.”
As early as last spring, Harry Winston Chairman Bob Gannicott was meeting with potential buyers, including private-equity firms and luxury companies, sources told The Post.
Rumors last fall had focused on luxury giants LVMH and PPR as likely suitors for the 81-year-old upscale chain, whose salons push bulky baubles priced mostly at $200,000 and up.
But some insiders still saw Swatch as a more logical acquirer as the company has made no secret of its luxury aspirations while sitting on a pile of Swiss francs worth more than $2 billion.
“Harry Winston brilliantly complements the prestige segment of the group,” said Nayla Hayek, Swatch’s chairman. “Diamonds are still a girl’s best friend.”
Despite its image as a maker of cheap, plastic timepieces for the masses, some investors had long pegged Swatch as a front-runner in a prospective acquisition of jeweler Tiffany & Co. In 2011, however, a disastrous watch partnership between the two companies ended in acrimony.
Tiffany shares yesterday climbed 1.6 percent, to $61.25, on fresh speculation that the jeweler known for its robin’s egg blue boxes and bags might be a target.
“If anything, I think this could mean more competition for Tiffany,” one Harry Winston shareholder said yesterday. “You’re not going to see plastic watches in Harry Winston stores, but they’ll probably want to broaden the appeal of the brand.”
Swatch’s deal marks the second time in eight years that the century-old jeweler has changed hands.
After decades of infighting between family heirs and stagnant sales under private-equity ownership, Harry Winston in 2004 was sold to Aber, a Canada-based mining company for $284 million.
Changing the acquiring company’s name to Harry Winston Diamond Corp., chairman Gannicott supervised an aggressive growth spurt that has studded the globe with 25 Harry Winston boutiques, led by the glitzy flagship on Fifth Avenue.
Nevertheless, insiders said Gannicott, a Canadian geologist by training who engineered the acquisition, never showed much passion for the luxury brand.
“People thought he came across like a lumberjack,” one insider said of Gannicott. “It was like they were worried he’d track mud on the floors.”
Indeed, Gannicott in a statement yesterday enthused about “a range of diamond resource opportunities” — that is, diamond mines — that are possible acquisitions as he returns the company to its mining roots and renames it Dominion Diamond Corp.