Figures the watch industry repeats, and what happened when we tried to trace them. Untraced does not mean false. It means nobody can show where the number came from — which is a different thing, and a checkable one.
32 claims · 1 disproved · 3 contested · 14 untraced · 14 traced
There is no legal definition, no industry threshold, no register, no certification and no body that adjudicates a claim. Compare "Swiss made", which is protected in ordinance. "In-house" cannot be breached because there is nothing to breach.
That figure, printed on Tudor's own certification page among others, is METAS-N001's tolerance for category 1a movements only (fitting diameter over 26mm). The same table sets 0 to +6 seconds a day for category 1b (20–26mm) and 0 to +7 for category 2 (20mm or under) — a three-step scale collapsed into one number by most of what gets published about it, brand pages included.
METAS's own N001 standard defines the "testing laboratory" — the entity that performs the tests — as one that "can be the applicant's in-house laboratory or the laboratory of a third-party entity commissioned by the applicant," acting under the applicant's own responsibility. METAS's stated role is to monitor that laboratory through statistical analysis of its results and periodic sample checks, not to run the day-to-day testing itself.
Against the January list it cannot have: the metal moved $3.10 a gram between the two lists, and recovering $2,200 at that rate needs 710 grams of fine gold in the watch. Against an autumn 2025 baseline it comfortably can. Rolex publishes neither the baseline it prices from nor the weight of gold in the watch, so the claim cannot be tested from outside — which is a different objection from saying it is false.
Records are quoted constantly in the trade. A specific result needs a specific lot reference, and the sales in question are not all documented in a form a reader can be pointed at, so the piece cites the existence of specialist watch departments rather than a hammer price. The direction of the reappraisal is not in dispute; a number attached to it would need a citation we do not have.
No regulator has tested that question for oscillating components. The ETA restriction is documented and was wound down under a competition settlement; nothing establishes the same for the regulating organ, and this publication does not assert it.
The figure the trade uses and the one Rexhepi's own comments about staying small are consistent with, but no audited or filed production number exists for a private Geneva atelier. Treated as the working assumption it is.
We have found no published rate whose method and cohort are stated. Every figure we have seen is asserted. If one exists with a traceable denominator, we will correct this and write the original piece.
Article 8 makes any breach subject to the criminal provisions of the Trade Mark Protection Act. We could find no published count of prosecutions or convictions. FH's anti-counterfeiting pages report seizures of fakes — a different offence — and the most recent figures there date from 2014. A rule is only as strong as its enforcement record, and this one's is not public.
No filing, no regulator's finding, no company statement. It appears in trade coverage without attribution, gets repeated, and hardens into fact. Swatch Group's own page calls the company "the leading Swiss specialist" in oscillating and escapement parts, which is documented and sufficient; the percentage is not.
There is not one on the record. Reuters asked and reported that "Rolex declined to comment for this story", building the report instead on two luxury research platforms and two dealers; the trade coverage that followed carries no company comment either. Every published explanation of why gold prices rose is inference by people outside the company.
Establishing it needs component-level disclosure from every candidate, and none of them publish it. What is checkable is what Seiko demonstrably makes, which is a great deal; the superlative is not, and the piece describes rather than ranks.
Real in the trade, and the pitch for the piece raised it. But the Prospex, Presage and King Seiko pages resolve identically across the company's own global, US, UK and Japanese paths, so it could not be evidenced from the record and was not printed as a finding.
The date is repeated almost everywhere the watch is written about. It does not appear on Yema's own history page, which does not mention 1963 at all — the brand's Superman entry is dated 1967 and concerns the bezel-lock patent, and its collection page says only "first introduced in the 1960s". A brand that documents its own timeline in detail and omits the founding date of its most famous model is worth noticing.
No figure is published by the company, and the estimates that circulate are ones it says deviate on average by 24%, with four of twelve brands more than 40% off. The corrections it has issued are partial — a margin here, a retail share there — and cannot be assembled into a revenue line. Nobody outside the company knows, and the company has chosen not to say.
No public figure exists that we can trace to a source. This is the denominator the commissioned piece needed, and its absence is why that piece is not this one.
Rolex publishes no case, bracelet or gross weight for any reference, in its own specifications or anywhere else. Dealers weigh individual watches and publish the result — one listed ref. 18238 at 129.4 grams gross — but an individual second-hand watch on a dealer's scale is not a factory figure, and no factory figure exists to check it against.
Widely repeated, including on Wikipedia. We have not found a filing, an audited figure or a company statement behind it. Plausible for the period and the plant; still nobody's number.
Reported by Forbes in its coverage of the sale, which the piece cites. Traced to named reporting of a public auction result rather than to trade repetition.
Both read from the LBMA PM benchmark daily series. Rebased to the 2 January setting of $4,352.95, the July low is 8.3% below where the year began, and all fifty-one settings from 1 June to 10 August sit below the 5.0% the yellow gold list rose.
It has more than doubled. The PM benchmark was $1,920.90 on 10 August 2023 and $4,335.55 on 7 August 2026, a rise of 125.7%. The trade's version of this claim is the one part of the explanation that survives checking.
Both figures are the LBMA PM benchmark, read from the LBMA's own published daily series. The fall between the two is 17.7%.
Net sales by geographical region, 2025 annual report. A fall of CHF 368m, disclosed to the million, in the same document that gives brands adjectives.
Its reply of 5 March 2026, in those words.
Read off the segment information notes in the half-year report and the 2025 annual report. Corporate is shown separately and is explicitly not a segment.
Published in its open letter of 27 February 2026, rebutting the claim that Longines had become loss-making. It appears nowhere in the annual report.
Read off Yema's own Superman collection page on 5 August 2026.
Article 1 paragraph 3 of the ordinance removes the component that enables the watch to be worn from the definition of a watch. FH's guide states the consequence in terms, and adds that even a bracelet soldered on permanently keeps its costs out of the sum.
Both figures are read off the Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry's own worked examples on page 18 of its guide, which set out Variant 1 and Variant 2 side by side on identical components and identical costs.
Stated by FH's guide, which says the effect is to prevent a weakening of the Swiss made concept. This is the provision that most rebuts a cynical reading of the label and it is why the piece does not offer one.
Read off FH's own list, status 18 September 2025. The steel entries are numbered 18 and 19 at 90%; the titanium entries 22 and 23 at 95%.
Stated by Yema itself, in those terms, on its in-house calibers page. Quoted rather than characterised, because the precision is the point.