Swiss watchmakers Montblanc, Ateliers deMonaco, and H. Moser adopt very different strategies to compete with the Apple Watch
Can the Swiss Watchmaker Survive the Digital Age? — Masters of one of the world's most revered forms of analog craftsmanship take on the smartwatch.
Context & Ripple Effects
By mid-2015 the Swiss watch industry was already splitting into camps: some maisons had launched luxury smartwatches with embedded activity tracking on an open platform, while the co-inventor of the Swatch publicly warned that Apple would succeed and an "Ice Age" was coming for Swiss watches. TAG Heuer chose a third path, partnering with Google and Intel on a luxury Android Wear device.
This New York Times piece captures Montblanc, Ateliers deMonaco, and H. Moser making three different bets at that fork — and the subsequent quarter validated the stakes, with smartwatches outselling Swiss watches for the first time in late 2015 while Apple took the majority of smartwatch shipments.
First-order effects
- Montblanc, Ateliers deMonaco, and H. Moser each commit to a distinct competitive posture against the Apple Watch — embrace the connected device, hybridize, or double down on analog craftsmanship — rather than a single industry response.
- TAG Heuer's Google-and-Intel alliance sets an immediate benchmark: any Swiss maison entering smartwatches must now choose between licensing a big-tech platform or building its own.
Second-order effects
- Platform owners like Google and Intel gain pricing and specification power over luxury hardware partners, mirroring the smartphone dynamic where the OS vendor captures more value than the case maker.
- Apple's dominance of smartwatch shipments pressures mid-tier Swiss brands hardest, since their buyers overlap most with first-time smartwatch purchasers, pushing them toward either differentiation or discounting.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Swiss watchmaking bifurcates structurally into platform-licensed tech brands and heritage analog houses, with the middle market hollowed out.
- Design protection follows the product into software — as later shown by Swatch seeking $170M from Samsung over cloned digital watch face designs — meaning brand defense for watchmakers now includes app stores, not just dials.
The trend: Luxury watchmaking is fragmenting into platform adopters and analog purists, with big-tech operating systems setting the terms for whichever half digitizes.