The Fascinating Story of Swatch: How One Man Saved an Entire Country's Industry

In 1979 a confidential report sits on a table in Zurich. The Swiss banking consortium has commissioned it. Its conclusion reads like a death certificate. The Swiss watch industry, the pride of a country for three centuries, is finished. The recommendation is a managed funeral. Liquidate the two great Swiss watch houses, ASUAG and SSIH, before they collapse on their own. Sell off the brands to the Japanese. Cut losses. End it cleanly. The watchmaking industry of Switzerland has been declared, in writing, beyond resuscitation. This is the world before Nicolas Hayek arrives. Switzerland has produced ninety-five percent of the world's mechanical watches since the early twentieth century. Geneva and the Jura mountains are the global standard for precision timekeeping. The Swiss watch is a national symbol. Then in 1969 Seiko releases the world's first commercial quartz wristwatch. A small crystal vibrates at thirty-two thousand seven hundred sixty-eight times per second. Accurate to within fifteen seconds a month. Cheap to produce. Within a decade the Swiss share of the world watch market collapses from over fifty percent to twenty-four percent. The number of Swiss watch companies falls from over sixteen hundred in 1970 to fewer than six hundred by the mid-eighties. Employment drops from ninety thousand workers to thirty-three thousand. Sixty thousand jobs vanish. Whole valleys empty. Centuries-old workshops close one by one.