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China Just BROKE The Swiss Movement Monopoly For Good

How China broke the Swiss watch movement monopoly, reshaping the global watch industry and challenging Swiss prestige.

Key Takeaways

  • China legally acquired and improved Swiss watch movement technology, enabling a robust domestic watch industry.
  • Seagull is now the largest mechanical movement manufacturer globally, producing about 25% of all movements.
  • The Swiss watch industry survived the quartz crisis by repositioning mechanical watches as luxury heritage items.
  • The withdrawal of ETA movement supplies opened opportunities for new players, including Chinese manufacturers.
  • Chinese watch brands are gaining international recognition and prestige, challenging Swiss dominance.

What the video covers

  • Switzerland controlled the mechanical watch movement market for over a century, supplying movements to most fine watches worldwide.
  • China began developing its watch industry in the 1950s, starting with the Wuxing movement and advancing through legal acquisition and improvement of Swiss designs.
  • Project 304 led to the creation of the ST19 chronograph movement based on the Swiss Venus 175, marking a key milestone in Chinese watchmaking.
  • The 1970s quartz crisis nearly destroyed the Swiss watch industry, but Nicolas Hayek revived it by repositioning mechanical watches as luxury items.
  • Swatch Group's ETA subsidiary controlled up to 97% of Swiss movement supply but began cutting third-party supplies in 2002, creating a market vacuum.
  • Swiss company Sellita and Chinese company Seagull filled the vacuum, with Seagull becoming the world's largest mechanical movement manufacturer.
  • Seagull advanced Chinese watchmaking by mass-producing complex mechanisms like tourbillons and minute repeaters at competitive prices.
  • Chinese brands began gaining prestige, winning major awards like the Grand Prix d'Horlogerie de Genève, challenging Swiss dominance.
  • Swiss watch exports hit record highs in 2023, but the industry faces complex challenges due to shifting consumer preferences and rising Chinese competition.
  • The longstanding Swiss prestige monopoly in fine mechanical watchmaking is cracking as Chinese innovation and production scale grow rapidly.

Chapters

  1. 00:00Introduction: China breaks Swiss watch movement monopoly
  2. 00:49China's early watchmaking efforts and Project 304
  3. 01:37Acquisition and development of the ST19 movement
  4. 02:36The quartz crisis and Swiss industry collapse
  5. 04:25Nicolas Hayek and the Swatch Group revival
  6. 05:23ETA's withdrawal and new movement suppliers
  7. 06:24Seagull's technological advancements and production scale
  8. 07:19Chinese brands gaining prestige and industry recognition
  9. 09:04Swiss export trends and future industry challenges
  10. 10:56Conclusion: The shifting prestige and future of watchmaking

Answers

Questions about this video

How did China legally acquire Swiss watch movement technology?

In 1961, China purchased the tooling, specifications, and blueprints for the Swiss Venus 175 chronograph movement from the Swiss company Venus, enabling them to legally produce and improve upon the design.

What role did the quartz crisis play in the Swiss watch industry?

The quartz crisis in the 1970s severely damaged the Swiss watch industry by introducing cheaper, more accurate quartz watches from Japan, causing Swiss market share and employment to plummet before a revival led by Nicolas Hayek.

Why is Seagull significant in the global watch movement market?

Seagull, based in Tianjin, China, is now the world's largest mechanical movement manufacturer, producing about one in every four mechanical movements globally and pioneering affordable production of complex watch mechanisms.

Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

00:00
Speaker A
This is the story of how China dismantled one of the most powerful industrial monopolies the modern world has ever seen and how the Swiss watch industry is now paying the price. For over a century, Switzerland controlled the heartbeat of every fine watch on
00:14
Speaker A
earth. Not the brands, not the designs, the actual engine inside the watch, the movement. [music] The caliber, the mechanism that converts gears and springs into time itself.
00:24
Speaker A
Switzerland owned that, and the world had no choice but to buy it from them. You want a real watch, you need a Swiss movement. That was the arrangement until it stopped being one. China exported 605 million watches in 2024.
00:39
Speaker A
Switzerland shipped 15.3 million. That gap, 40 units to one, is not a rounding error, and for the first time in history, China is not just winning on price.
00:49
Speaker A
Prestige is falling too. By the end of this video, you will understand exactly how that shift happened, why it matters, and why certain boardrooms in Geneva are a great deal quieter than they used to be. Start in 1955. China had almost
01:03
Speaker A
nothing in the way of manufacturing. The Korean War had just ended. The country was rebuilding from scratch. A small group of watchmakers in Tianjin, a city in northeastern China, sat down with a basic Swiss pin lever design and began
01:17
Speaker A
trying to build a wristwatch using local materials and local hands. On March 24th of that year, they pulled it off. They called it the Wuxing, which translates to five star.
01:26
Speaker A
[music] It was rough. It was simple, but nobody else had made it. That team and that factory would eventually become the Tianjin Seagull Watch Group, known today as Seagull.
01:37
Speaker A
[music] Now here is something the watch industry does not advertise. Six years after the Wuxing in 1961, the Chinese government launched something called Project 304. The mission was a chronograph movement for the Chinese Air Force, and a chronograph
01:51
Speaker A
measures elapsed time with precision, which made it useful for pilots and navigators. Mechanically, it sits among the most complex things you can put inside a wristwatch, and China did not have one.
02:03
Speaker A
What they did next gets misrepresented constantly. [music] They contacted a Swiss company called Venus. Venus produced a movement called the Venus 175, a legendary column wheel chronograph that powered watches sold under some of the most famous Swiss names, and Venus, needing capital,
02:19
Speaker A
agreed to sell, not lease, not license under pressure. Sell. [music] The tooling, the specifications, the blueprints, all of it changed hands legally for money. China took that Venus 175, upgraded it from 17 jewels to 19, and delivered the first 1,400 units to
02:36
Speaker A
the Chinese Air Force in 1966. That movement became the ST19, and it was revived in 2003 as the engine behind the Seagull 1963, a watch that has been reviewed thousands of times on YouTube and in watch publications. Nobody copies
02:52
Speaker A
a movement they legally purchased. China bought the plans, improved the design, and built an industry around the result.
02:59
Speaker A
By 1965, Seagull had gone further still. They completed the ST5, a movement they designed entirely in China with no foreign tooling and no outside blueprints. First [music] 100% original Chinese mechanical movement. Geneva did not throw a party, but it happened anyway. Meanwhile, on
03:17
Speaker A
the other side of the world, something was about to detonate inside Swiss watchmaking. Seiko released a watch called the Astron in December of 1969, and it ran on quartz. A quartz oscillator keeps time far more accurately than a mechanical balance
03:32
Speaker A
wheel, and it costs a fraction of the price to produce, which meant the Japanese had built a weapon that made the entire Swiss industry look suddenly dated. Over the next 15 years, that weapon nearly finished Switzerland off.
03:44
Speaker A
Before the quartz crisis, Switzerland controlled more than half the global watch market. By 1978, that share had collapsed to 24%. Employment in the Swiss watch industry dropped from 90,000 workers in 1970 to 33,000 by 1984. And the number of operating companies fell
04:01
Speaker A
from over 1,600 down to fewer than 600. Entire towns built around watchmaking went economically dark. What the Swiss lost was not just market share. They nearly lost the industry itself.
04:14
Speaker A
The man who reversed that collapse was Nicolas Hayek. He orchestrated the merger of the two biggest Swiss groups, ASUAG and SSIH, into what eventually became the Swatch Group.
04:25
Speaker A
[music] And his argument was that mechanical watches should stop trying to compete with quartz on accuracy or price. Sell them as luxury objects, as emotional investments, as pieces of heritage you wear on your wrist. That repositioning worked. Swiss watchmaking came back from
04:40
Speaker A
what looked like a finished story. But Hayek did something else at the same time. And this is where things get complicated. The Swatch Group controlled a subsidiary called ETA. And ETA was not just making Swatch watches. It was
04:51
Speaker A
supplying the movements that went inside watches sold by dozens of other Swiss and international brands. Hayek himself described the situation as being like BMW supplying all the engines for Audi and Mercedes. At one point, he claimed Swatch Group supplied close to 97% of
05:06
Speaker A
Swiss movements to the outside market. Then, in 2002, he announced that ETA would begin cutting off those third-party supplies. What followed was nearly two decades of antitrust battles and regulatory fights. And by around 2019 and 2020, ETA had completed its
05:23
Speaker A
withdrawal from outside supply. That withdrawal opened a vacuum that two players moved into. The first was a Swiss company called Sellita, which had built up its own production quietly and now puts out around 1 million movements a year. The second was Seagull. And
05:38
Speaker A
Seagull was operating at a completely different scale. [music] By 2005, Seagull had already produced China's first serially manufactured tourbillon. A tourbillon is a rotating cage that holds the escapement of a watch, counteracting the effects of gravity on timekeeping accuracy, and in
05:54
Speaker A
the early 20th century, it took a master watchmaker weeks to assemble a single one by hand. Swiss brands sell tourbillons for six figures. Some sell them for seven. Seagull put them into serial production at prices the Swiss could not touch. 2006 brought China's
06:09
Speaker A
first double minute repeater, a complication that chimes the time on request through tiny hammers striking gongs, and which sits among the rarest and most technically demanding mechanisms in all of horology. 2007 produced the first Chinese double tourbillon.
06:24
Speaker A
By 2009, Seagull had completed a triple minute repeater combined with a perpetual calendar. A perpetual calendar being a mechanism that automatically accounts for months of different lengths and for leap years without manual adjustment. China was climbing the complication ladder faster than most
06:39
Speaker A
Western observers wanted to admit. Seagull today holds an annual production capacity of around 3 million movements.
06:46
Speaker A
Multiple independent assessments place their output at roughly a quarter of all mechanical movements manufactured worldwide in a given year. One factory in Tianjin produces approximately one in every four mechanical movements made on Earth. The world's largest movement maker operates not in Geneva, not in Le
07:03
Speaker A
Locle, not anywhere in Switzerland. It operates in China. Prestige, though, is where this story shifts into territory that nobody in the Swiss establishment saw coming. The Grand Prix d'Horlogerie de Genève, the GPHG, has been called the Oscars of watchmaking since its founding
07:19
Speaker A
in 2001. The jury pulls from watch experts, journalists, and collectors across the world, and the ceremony takes place in Geneva. Winning a GPHG category has been the kind of validation that Swiss and European brands competed for and bragged about for over two decades.
07:35
Speaker A
In November of 2021, a Shenzhen brand called Ciga Design submitted a watch called the Blue Planet. Ciga Design was founded by an industrial designer named Xiang Jianmin, and the Blue Planet is a 46-mm titanium watch with a rotating
07:49
Speaker A
three-dimensional al
08:04
Speaker A
No Chinese watch had ever won a GPHG category before. The New York Times ran the headline, "The Chinese watch brand that beat the Swiss." Shortly after, the Blue Planet entered the permanent collection of the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire in Geneva, one of the most
08:19
Speaker A
respected museum collections in Swiss cultural history. That was 2021. Four years later, a watchmaker named Dai Sinyan, 25 years old at the time of the win, submitted a watch from a brand he founded called Fam Al Hut. The watches
08:35
Speaker A
are designed in Chongqing and produced in a Shanghai manufacture. In November of 2025, Fam Al Hut won the GPHG Audacity Prize for a watch called the Möbius. A capsule-shaped lugless timepiece housing a bi-axis tourbillon. Only the second Chinese brand in the history of the GPHG
08:53
Speaker A
to win a category. Dai Sinyan told Xinhua that China had moved beyond the stage of simply having recognizable names.
09:00
Speaker A
[music] His words were that they had entered the era of proving how good they could be.
09:04
Speaker A
While those wins were accumulating, the Swiss export numbers were moving in one direction only. 2023 produced a record CHF 26.7 billion in Swiss watch exports.
09:16
Speaker A
Then 2024 came in at CHF 26.0 billion, down 2.8%. With volume falling to 15.3 million units, a historically low count.
09:27
Speaker A
2025 registered CHF 25.6 billion, down another 1.7% with volume shrinking further to 14.6 million units. Two consecutive years of declining exports from an industry whose entire identity rests on the idea that demand for Swiss watches travels in one
09:45
Speaker A
direction. The China connection runs through all of it. Swiss exports to China fell 12.1% in 2025 alone, and over 2 years the total drop exceeded a third of previous volume. Swiss brands had constructed entire business models around the
10:00
Speaker A
Chinese consumers appetite for luxury watches, and that appetite was redirecting itself. Deloitte described 2025 as one of the most complex periods in recent memory for the Swiss watch industry. The Federation of the Swiss watch industry told reporters to expect
10:16
Speaker A
2026 to be steady at best, a phrase that does not belong in the vocabulary of an industry that spent 40 years surfing upward.
10:24
Speaker A
What was building in China during those same years stretched well beyond Seagull. A brand called Atelier Wen, founded by two Frenchmen named Robin Tallendier and Wilfried Buiron, was producing watches built around upgraded Peacock and Dandong movements, regulating each one to plus or minus 10
10:40
Speaker A
seconds per day across five positions before shipping. The Peacock brand itself, from the Dandong Watch Factory founded in 1973, released a central tourbillon called the Black Hole carrying a 120-hour power reserve. Ariel Adams of a blog to watch,
10:56
Speaker A
one of the most read watch publications in the world, reviewed the Peacock Black Hole in December of 2025 and noted that when he started covering watches nearly 20 years earlier, Chinese tourbillons were defined by two things: questionable quality and imitation
11:11
Speaker A
designs. He described the Black Hole as a strong signal of the natural evolution of the Chinese wristwatch industry. That is not faint praise from someone who has reviewed six-figure Swiss pieces for two decades. What actually collapsed was two
11:25
Speaker A
specific things, and it helps to name them precisely. The first was the movement supply monopoly. ETA and a small group of Swiss ebauche manufacturers once held what amounted to a chokehold on the global supply of credible mechanical movements. That hold
11:39
Speaker A
is finished. Seagull supplies roughly a quarter of the world's mechanical movements at prices no Swiss company can approach. Sellita absorbed the premium end of the gap ETA left behind, but the volume, the actual engine count that keeps the global watch industry running,
11:54
Speaker A
flows through China. The second was the prestige monopoly, the assumption that serious conversations about fine mechanical watch making began and ended in Switzerland. That assumption has cracked. Patek Philippe, Rolex, Audemars Piguet, A. Lange & Söhne, the ultra-luxury tier of Swiss watch making
12:12
Speaker A
sits untouched for now. Nobody in Shenzhen or Chongqing is currently competing with a Patek Philippe Grand Complication at prices that require a second mortgage, but at every price level below that ceiling, the rules of the conversation have permanently
12:25
Speaker A
shifted. A Seagull tourbillon sells for a few thousand dollars. An equivalent complication from a Swiss brand costs six figures. A Ciga Design watch collected a prize in Geneva. A Fam al Hut by Axis tourbillon competed directly against Bulgari on the GPHG stage. A
12:41
Speaker A
Peacock Central tourbillon received serious coverage from the world's top watch press. None of these are cheap replicas. They are horological objects that collectors and critics are treating with genuine respect. None of it happened quickly. The foundation was laid in Tianjin in 1955 when a team of
12:58
Speaker A
engineers built a watch from nothing. It accelerated in 1961 when China purchased the rights to a Swiss chronograph movement and spent decades refining what they learned. It matured in 2005 when serial tourbillon production began in China at prices that exposed how
13:13
Speaker A
inflated the Swiss pricing model had always been. And it was confirmed twice when Geneva handed its highest award to Chinese watches in 2021 and again in 2025. Switzerland is is finished. The craft at the very top remains unmatched,
13:29
Speaker A
and the names on the dials of the world's most expensive watches are still Swiss. But, the Switzerland that existed 50 years ago, the one that controlled movements, locked up complications, and owned the entire conversation about what a serious watch even was, that
13:42
Speaker A
Switzerland no longer exists. China dismantled it over seven decades through patience, investment, and the steady work of people who decided that the most prestigious closed industry on Earth was not going to stay closed to them. The watch on your wrist might still read
13:56
Speaker A
Swiss made, [music] but the movement inside it might not be. And the movement competing with it almost certainly comes from somewhere else entirely.
Topics:Swiss watch industryChinese watchmakingSeagull watcheswatch movementsETA movementsquartz crisismechanical watchestourbillonGrand Prix d'Horlogerie de Genèvewatch industry monopoly

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