Innovation Powerhouse

The history began in 1981

More than 30 years ago Swatch introduced a simplified, Swiss-made quartz wristwatch with only 51 parts. The world’s first plastic watch was made not by hand in the traditional Swiss manner, but on a fully-automated assembly line. The small number of parts and automated assembly made quality Swiss watches accessible, for the first time, to millions of people.

Swatch Group and its patents
Nayla Hayek, Chair of the Swatch Group Board of Directors, addressed the important issue of patents at the Annual General Meeting on May 11, 2016 at the Velodrome in Grenchen (SO), Switzerland. We invite you to read her comments here.

In recent years the research activities of the various Swatch Group companies led to the development of numerous inventions, some of which were integrated into commercial products while some were reserved for future application and others were used for strategic purposes such as preventing competitors from applying certain technologies and solutions.

Swatch Group has approximately 1,800 existing patent families, representing more than 10,000 national patents. Each patent family covers, essentially, all the main producing countries and watch markets. A patent family represents an invention protected in several countries by a national patent from each relevant country.