Editor’s note: This is part 2 of a long read from the second edition of NOW Magazine, which you can pick up here. If you missed Part 1, you can find it right here. The story so far is a space race between America, Switzerland and Japan as they sought to manufacture battery powered quartz watches at scale. On Christmas Day in 1969, Seiko beat both the Americans and the Swiss to the quartz punch when they released the gold-cased Astron. But while quartz was now on the scene, digital watches were en vogue, even gracing the wrist of James Bond when Roger Moore wore a Hamilton Pulsar P2 in the 1973 film Live And Let Die. Digital watches with either LED (Light Emitting Diode) or later LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) time displays also opened the doors for electronics companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Motorola and Texas Instruments to make watches, further squeezing the Swiss watchmaking companies. By 1978, it was all biting. The Swiss watch industry was in very serious trouble, and the move was made to restructure the industry, creating a scenario straight out of a Management Consulting textbook. This environment of necessarily aggressive mergers and acquisitions saw the rise of…
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