Industry

Swatch Group reports two operating segments, and the entire watch business is a single line in them. Its brands are described in adjectives. Then in February 2026 it published brand-level margins, growth rates, retail shares and average selling prices — not in a report, but in an open letter correcting a Morgan Stanley estimate. Morgan Stanley's reply confirms the detail had never been disclosed publicly.

A hairspring is a few micrograms of alloy that has to stay elastic across temperature, magnetism and a decade of flexing ten times a second. One company dominates their supply in Switzerland, and Swatch Group owns it. A look at the industry's most consequential dependency, and why almost nobody has escaped it.

"In-house" has no agreed definition and no legal one. Meanwhile the dials, hands, cases, crowns and crystals in watches at every price point come from a small number of specialists — and Swatch Group names most of them on its own website. A look at what the marketing language actually obscures, and the one part of it worth caring about.

The movement supply squeeze forced a generation of brands onto Sellita, Miyota and in-house programmes, and forced their marketing to make a virtue of it. The regulator lifted the squeeze in 2020. The marketing built on it is still here.

The artificial-scarcity model that defined a decade of watch retail is unwinding from the edges — while the handful of watches that invented it remain as unbuyable as ever. What that gap tells you.

The FHS export statistics are the industry's most-quoted and most-misread numbers. A working guide to reading them properly, using the freshly published first-half 2026 data as the worked example.