Watch breaking news videos, viral videos and original video clips on CNN.com. Black Watch (Royal Highland Regiment) in the Second World War, The Wartime Memories Project. After Inuyasha and his friends stop to bury the dead, Sango reveals the secret story of the Shikon Jewel's origins: the priestess Midoriko's own soul. A Brief History Of ETA: THE Swiss Watch Movement Maker . We will go ahead and say this. The Swiss remained fairly ignorant when it came to quartz technology. The problem was that while they had their quartz movements developed relatively early from the market's perspective, they reacted much too late when it came to industrializing the concept. They couldn't keep up with the pricing cuts performed by the Asian competition. To be fair it has to be noted that ETA did get into quartz movement manufacturing, and it is something they do presently as well. They even managed to make the slimmest quartz watch of the time, called the Delirium. Announced in 1. 97. What allowed them to create a wristwatch so extraordinarily thin was neglecting the main plate and placing the movement’s components on the case back itself. But no technological developments could have been powerful enough to subdue the effects of the second . In 1. 97. 3- 1. 97. Swiss franc against other currencies. I really appreciate what you've said. I know that many people watch. Pay It 4ward: Man who lost child to illness spends time helping others. For honeymooners nothing was more romantic than the Pocono Mountains, in northeastern Pennsylvania. Now it's the Former Honeymoon Capital of the World as the resorts.This had been making exported Swiss watches more expensive year after year and this went on for almost an entire decade. In essence, the Swiss were losing just about all their markets to Asian competitors for two main reasons. For one, the franc's appreciation was making their exported watches ever more expensive abroad. Select a message below to watch or receive for a gift of any amount. Search for any message by a number or title. For the second, the technology necessary to greatly reduce manufacturing costs had not been developed soon enough. Any one of these circumstances would have been enough to make Swiss watches . Sales figures of more than 8. The market share of Swiss watches worldwide dropped from more than 8. This inevitably resulted in a steep and ceaseless decline in employment, from 8. Counter- measures were required immediately. The mega- groups began excessively rationalizing their operations while tens of thousands have become unemployed and hundreds of factories have diminished. By 1. 98. 0 - despite all the efforts and sacrifices - ASUAG's losses had exceeded 4. By 1. 98. 2, much like in the 1. By this time, ASUAG's cumulative losses were in excess of 1. Swiss francs, and SSIH was on the brink of collapse with the volume of sales dropping from 1. All this called for some lightning fast moves before it all went under for good. As a result, all of a sudden, ETA SA contained all the small and large manufactures that ever joined ASUAG and hence it became a melting pot for hundreds of years worth of diverse watch making heritage and know- how. In 1. 98. 3 the two giants, ASUAG and SSIH finally joined forces as well, and they first turned into profitability by 1. That though, didn't satisfy the banks who had been funding all this pandemonium. UBS, Credit Suisse and Swiss Bank Corporation have poured more than 9. ASUAG and SSIH only to keep them going. They had every reason by now to consider the Swiss watch making doomed and that sentiment was only enforced by the Japanese who approached them with a generous offer for both ASUAG and SSIH. Had the Japanese managed to purchase these two major groups, they would have owned nearly all major Swiss manufactures, patents and brands. But that did not bother the banks and so they asked the prestigious consultancy firm called Hayek Engineering AG to prepare the sale.. Hayek, was outraged by the concept of Swiss watch making practically getting sold under his supervision. I assume most of you know where this is going. As the Wall Street Journal quotes Mr. Hayek: “The watch industry of Switzerland sells, in fact, the message of the culture of Switzerland, of everything you have heard about, our chalets, our fields, our mountains. One day, the president of a Japanese watch company in America said to me, . Switzerland can make cheese, but not watches! Why don't you sell us Omega for 4. One day, the president of a Japanese watch company in America said to me, 'You cannot manufacture watches. Switzerland can make cheese, but not watches! Why don’t you sell us Omega for 4. I told him, 'Only after I'm dead!'. Hayek, Wall Street Journal. He decided to fight back. However, he chose to do that not with luxury watches, but with the result of a revolutionary idea of something cheap, simple, fun.. The Swatch watch. Launched in 1. 98. Swatch was intended to be a second watch with which one could still express his or her personality, lifestyle or mood. Swatch, however, could not have existed had it not been for a movement design by two ETA engineers, Elmar Mock and Jacques M. The movement was based on the aforementioned layout developed for the ultra- slim Delirium quartz watch of 1. They have also managed to decrease the number of parts from about 1. Japanese competitors) to a mere 5. In no time Swatch watches began turning a hefty profit with sales sky- rocketing from 1. In 1. 98. 5 Hayek repurchased 5. ASUAG- SSIH duo and created the Swiss Corporation for Microelectronics and Watchmaking Industries Ltd. But in order to get the complete picture of the manufacture we must not stop just here. Instead, we should go on and discover the company's place in the last three decades of Swiss watch making. Our primary reason to do this is that it will help us better understand how ETA practically became the dominant power in the industry. Based on data from F. Actually, by 1. 98. Swiss watch making had set itself a very different trajectory indeed. One where only the sky was the limit. What you see above is an extract from several reports by the Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry (FH), showing how the industry performed between 1. In blue is the total export value (in millions of francs), indicating a solid growth with exports nearly doubling between '8. A truly heart- warming sight for sure, but it would not have been possible without some serious strategic planning going on behind the scenes. We have already seen that whenever this industry is hit by a crisis, the established custom is to try and reduce costs through the centralization and rationalization of production. The code of conduct was no different this time around either. As we know, from 1. ASUAG or SSIH - they were all united in Nicolas Hayek's SMH group. Consequently, ETA now belonged to SMH as well, but its story was very far from over as the aforementioned approach remained perfectly intact after SMH took over. What matters from our perspective is that movement production was centralized in ETA in order to control and ultimately lower manufacturing and research related costs. In practice this meant that several big names within SMH (such as Longines, Omega and others) had to either stop entirely, or at least cut back severely on the production of their proprietary movements and use ones purchased from ETA instead. This allowed - well, it forced - the affected brands to rearrange their spending and emphasize marketing instead of research and development. That is not to say that Nicolas Hayek and SMH wanted to cease investing in the manufacturing of movements. On the very contrary: they decided to dedicate most of their available resources to a single company instead of enabling several separate brands to develop on their own. What SMH did in practice is invest extremely heavily into the expansion of ETA. This primarily happened by establishing or buying out several specialized manufacturers. Over the course of a couple of years the group took over movement and component manufacturers, dial, case and crown makers as well as assemblers to make ETA as versatile as possible. The Nivarox- FAR headquarters. Supplier to an Entire Industry. This put ETA on a new path, one that was leading it to become . As part of SMH's previously mentioned massive investment strategy, the group brought component and movement manufacturers R. But perhaps none of these played as important of a role as did another ETA subsidiary called: Nivarox- FAR. Nivarox SA and Fabriques d'Assortiments R. They merged to become Nivarox- FAR in 1. Some time ago Ariel had the unique opportunity to visit the company and this is how he described it in his article: . Comprised of about four plant locations around Switzerland, Nivarox is a contraction of »ni variable, ni oxydable.? Balance springs, of course (also called hair springs). These little necessary parts are at the heart of what Nivarox has historically produced, and the primary component they are known for today. What is more is that they also make balance wheels, anchors, pallets, escapements, main springs and other tiny parts such as screws and small gears. Concisely, the group spent vast amounts of money to purchase or create specialized subsidiaries for ETA to enable it to function in just about all fields of watch making. Through these companies the group also financed the research and development of these components and the industrialization of their production. In line with these priorities Nivarox- FAR developed unparalleled capabilities in mass- producing extremely delicate and complex components. So even if there are brands that invested in manufacturing their proprietary in- house movements, nearly all of them have to buy some components from Nivarox to use in their own movements as only an extremely small number of manufactures are able to make hairsprings and other incredibly fine components for themselves. The result of all this? ETA became the sole supplier of movements for all Swatch Group brands as well as for most others in the industry. Its dominance had never been stronger. Based on data from Swatch Group annual reports, swatchgroup. To illustrate what this strength resulted in, I put together an extract from Swatch Group annual reports. The chart above shows how the group performed between 1. Swiss francs (in blue) and net profit (in red). What we see is an incredible growth over the course of years with relatively minor drops throughout. To give you an idea about ETA's role in all that, let me show you a noteworthy excerpt from one of these reports. In 2. 00. 1 the Swiss watch industry exported 1. Swiss francs worth of watches as per data from the Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry FH.
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