Groups
The holding groups, combines, state trusts and foundations that brought watch companies and factories under common control, and how each changed the way watches were made, owned and organized.
- ASUAG
The holding company set up in 1931 with federal money to control the makers of ébauches, balances, hairsprings and escapement parts and so stop the export of watch parts; it later bought finished-watch brands, and in 1983 it was rescued by the banks and merged with SSIH into the company that became the Swatch Group.
- Ebauches SA
The holding company of Swiss ébauche makers, founded in Neuchâtel in 1926: one pillar of the watch cartel, controlled by ASUAG from 1931, and later merged into ETA and the Swatch Group.
- HMT
The watch business of Hindustan Machine Tools, the Indian state engineering company of 1953, which began making watches at Bangalore in 1961 under a technical agreement with Citizen, ran India’s state watch factories at Bangalore, Tumkur, Ranibagh and Srinagar, and was closed after 2016.
- LVMH
The French luxury group formed in 1987 that entered watchmaking in 1999 by buying TAG Heuer, Ebel, Chaumet and Zenith, added Hublot in 2008 and Bulgari in 2011, and is one of the few groups that own most Swiss watch brands.
- Richemont
A Swiss luxury goods group, founded in 1988 and based in the canton of Geneva, that owns jewellers such as Cartier alongside a set of watchmakers it calls its Specialist Watchmakers, among them Vacheron Constantin, Panerai, IWC, Jaeger-LeCoultre and A. Lange & Söhne.
- Seiko Group
The Tokyo group that grew from Kintaro Hattori’s shop of 1881 into a house of sister firms: K. Hattori & Co.
- SSIH
The Swiss watch holding formed in 1930 by Omega and Tissot, which took in the movement maker Lemania and later other brands, among them Hamilton and Blancpain; it shrank after 1974, was kept going by the banks, and in 1983 merged with ASUAG into the company that became the Swatch Group.
- The Hans Wilsdorf Foundation
The private Geneva foundation that Hans Wilsdorf set up in 1945 and left his shares to, and which has owned the Rolex group, Tudor included, since his death in 1960.
- The Swatch Group
The Swiss watch group formed when the two largest Swiss watch companies, SSIH and ASUAG, were merged in 1983 to survive the quartz crisis.
- Tochmekh (State Trust of Precision Mechanics)
The Soviet State Trust of Precision Mechanics, Gostrest Tochmekh, into which the nationalised watch workshops and shops of the 1920s were gathered; Alan Garratt, its historian, records that it ran the assembly of imported parts, chose to buy American machinery, set up the two Moscow state watch factories of 1930 and was dissolved in 1933.
- VEB Glashütter Uhrenbetriebe (GUB)
The East German state company that from 1951 brought Glashütte’s expropriated watch firms, A. Lange & Söhne among them, into a single business, and whose privatised successor became Glashütte Original.
- VEB Uhrenkombinat Ruhla
The East German combine formed on 1 March 1967 that joined the state watch works of Ruhla, Glashütte and Weimar under one director-general at Ruhla, automated the mass-made pin-lever watch, and in 1978 passed with its works into the Kombinat Mikroelektronik Erfurt; the Treuhand broke it up after 1990.