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Clarifies the misinformation in this and other threads about Sellita movements and what ETA will do to restrict the availability of their movements after 2010...SELLITA: Moving In by Elizabeth Doerr
Viewed in a historical light, Sellita Watch Co. is one of the newer players in Switzerland’s movement market. It was founded in 1950 by Pierre Grandjean in La Chaux-de-Fonds as one of the independent companies specialized in the assembly of both manually wound and automatic ETA movements. This practice is age-old in Switzerland, with watch and movement assembly more often than not outsourced to specialists.
During the quartz watch crisis of the 1970s and 1980s, Sellita was conscious of the comfortable and economic technology that electronic movements represented, but it never abandoned production of mechanical movements. Continuing to obtain components and supplies from ETA, Sellita remained one of the champions of the mechanical movement in this era.
The modern era
Sellita’s role in the Swiss watch industry had pretty much remained the same until the year 2002. As one of the biggest assemblers and embellishers in the industry, Sellita had always taken ETA movements and personalized them for various watch brands all over the world.
In 2002, however, something happened that turned the entire industry upside down. Nicolas G. Hayek, head of the Swatch Group’s ETA—the world’s largest manufacturer of mechanical movements—decreed that the company would only sell kits, known as ébauches, to companies outside the group until the end of 2010. Since ETA delivers movements to well over 90 percent of all mechanical watch brands, this caused a flurry of activity in the watch industry.
All of a sudden, and within the next nine years, everyone was going to need a new source for Swiss-made mechanical watch movements. Sellita’s president, Miguel García, reacted immediately.
“Sellita has a big responsibility in our industry,” he explains. “Our customers trust us and trust that what we are doing will also benefit them.” It didn’t take García long to decide that his company needed to develop its own products if both it and its customers were going to survive after 2011, which will certainly represent the dawn of a new era in the Swiss watch industry.
García began by developing a new line of movements based on the dimensions of the existing calibers most used today. These new Sellita movements needed to be just as reliable, and above all fit in the existing cases and machinery set up for the standard ETA sizes. With the support of Sellita’s customers and suppliers—the latter actually even investing in new machinery—the company has now indeed created a line of new movements.
Until now, Sellita has embellished and finished about one million movements annually. This figure represents about 25 percent of Switzerland’s mechanical production, according to García...