Re: How a watch works - 1949 movie

On Feb 1, 10:02 pm, "Jack Denver" <nunuv...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"SWG" <swisswatch...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message

news:1fc4d47f-bffa-48ae-9e33-ce7420bc9db4@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx



Actually, the American Watch Industry had lost their leadership
already around before WWI, for the simple reason that the main
investors had since the very beginning underestimated the necessary
investments and the need for continuous heavy investments both in
material & production technology as well as in marketing. Instead they
took their huge profits from WWI and later on WWII to invest
elsewhere. (Dumain: page 358 "Revolution in Time David S. Landes). On
the other hand, in modern Switzerland, the watch industry has always
been a main source of revenues, the country could not afford to loose
(Landes, in his book, explains very precisely all the reasons of the
demise of the American Watch Industry).

To a certain extent the American watch manufacturers were right and the
Swiss were wrong - only thru some weird accident of popular taste/fashion
and the continued emotional resonance of the watch (which could not have
been rationally predicted, precisely because it IS irrational) did the
mechanical watch industry not go the way of the adding machine industry and
the typewriter industry. The Americans saw that little spring powered wind
up devices would not be the wave of the future as early as the end of WWII.
Sometimes history turns on accidents and individual personalities - if Rolex
had not been in the hands of a charitable trust and so was seeking quarterly
profits instead of long term results, if Hayek hadn't been there, the whole
story might have turned out differently.

Actually, Hayek was not the savour of the Swiss Watch Industry, e.g.
Rolex did not need any help. The Swiss Banks were the savours of both
the ASUAG and SSIH groups of companies. They paid Hayek Engineering
over CHF 300 Mio to inspect all the companies belonging to both
groups, and finally sold the whole to him for CHF 350 Mio. The
properties belonging to the pention schemes of all those companies
were already by themselves by far worth more than that. Swatch was
already well under way, invented by a group around Ernst Thomke at
ETA.

I do not want to make his contribution to the evolution of the Swiss
Watch Industry since the big crisis at the middle of the Seventees,
but no need to make him bigger as he already is.



Actually, it seems that since WWII progressively Americans do not seem
to want to be bothered with manufacturing. They seem to prefer to
trade on high tech, respectively on immaterial goods.

But we lost our watch industry long before we lost garments and shoes and
steel and cars and everything else - there must be some special explanation
for that aside from the general trend.

Investments and quarterly reports philosophy.

.

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