Industry

Patek, AP and Vacheron did not win a vote. Judge the top of watchmaking on movement architecture, finishing discipline and real invention, and two of the three chairs belong to A. Lange & Söhne and Grand Seiko.

The Convention patronale de l'industrie horlogere suisse, the Swiss watch industry's own employers' body, published a five-yearly workforce census in November 2022 stating the trade needs 3,835 additional qualified staff by 2026: 1,466 for growth and 2,369 to replace retirements. The figure is public, precise, and rarely quoted outside French-language trade circles. This piece traces where the number comes from, why the training pipeline behind it takes the better part of a decade to produce a specialist, and what the brands themselves have told two competition authorities about why general certification stopped being enough.

The refusal of Swiss watch manufacturers to sell spare parts to independent watchmakers was litigated in Brussels, Luxembourg, Bern and London across two decades. The documents are public and almost nobody has read them. They show one rule written for cars and deliberately not written for watches, two competition authorities each declining to decide because the other had already declined, and a regulator's own staff finding indications of an abuse and then filing the case.

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.