ETA SA

And it's how over the last 20 years, we came from 100 employees to roughly 1,000, verticalizing and creating our own movements or at least producing all main components of these so that we could really be autonomous.

The Salita, I think, for years was described, as you said, as an ETA alternative.

And I think that that description is now outdated.

Well,

All these movement suppliers basically, with the quartz crisis, disappeared, and we all basically bought what later became, later on, Swatchco.

So you had Valjoux, you had...

You had ETA, Alemania, all these ones.

They were somehow bought at some different points and more or less all disappeared.

And there are big ones like Tag Heuer and Bremond and Norkain and some other big brands that are actually using Breitling, of course, that are using AMT movements now as manufacturer movements that are made especially for them with certain specialities that are just exclusive to each of these brands.

They seem to have not just taken on all of the, you know, ETA supply of the SW range, right? But they actually have gotten so good at this kind of business.

that they're really market leading, right? I think there's Lajupere, Soprot, Miota and Seco and all of these guys who are supplying microbrands.

Celita is there too and is the big kahuna now.

And then with AMT, they're also doing all of this manufacture semi-in-house, not really in-house, of course, but this kind of manufacture movement supply, right? I found this very interesting of how they became such a powerhouse in Swiss watchmaking, purely with the decision from ETA not to supply others with their watches

anymore.

Which, in retrospect, was probably like ETA still kicking themselves for that one.

And now you do notice that there are more ETA movements available in third-party watches.

The

problem is ever since Eta bought Valjoux, they call everything an Eta movement, right?

Yeah.

Boom! 7753, I guess, right? Yeah.

That's what we can infer from their, uh, technical specs and, and communications, but th- that's something that they never actually mention on their, on their, uh, literature or anything that you can find, or at least that I was able to find.

But, um, then, uh, in 2003, ETA actually came out with, with the, a movement, uh, that, that had this specific function.

And we know who owns ETA, Swatch, right? And who owns Omega, Swatch.

So hence, we can probably make the connection there.

I mean, it's not something that, that they connect right away.

Like, ETA never says, "Oh, because Omega did this, we can, we applied it to ours," or vice versa.

So that's not something that I was able to find.

But, uh, Omega explicitly has marketed for crossing time zones, preserving uninterrupted timekeeping, correcting daylight saving or seasonal time, and then keeping the date synchronized with local time as the hour hand crosses midnight.

And with Tudor, it was a little bit different.

Tudor started, well, they never really left, but Tudor was always a Rolex who had a, a, with ETA movement inside, and then Tudor stamped on a dial-

Yeah

... for a long time.

...

they also do the sapphire crystals for, uh, for Swatch.

ETA makes the, the System 51 movements, and then the whole bio ceramic production process takes place in Grenchen near Breitling-

[laughs]