It has been ten years since the late Nicolas Hayek warned that he was going to cut the deliveries of ebauches to his competitors.
While some brands, like Breitling or Panerai, did their best to integrate their production as much as possible, some others, like IWC for example, did not seek to develop other house-made movements, to compensate for a possible ending of the precious 7750 and 2824 deliveries.
Whether they are ants or cicadas, hard workers or lazy, nobody foresaw the current core issue, which actually has to do with the "heart" of the watch.
Indeed, the end of the Swatch group deliveries had been well anticipated by the "shavings makers" (like Tech Ebauches, Sellita, Technotime, Concepto, etc.…), who created a "CNC" Maginot line.
But the fate of Maginot lines is to be by-passed: actually, the problem specifically comes from the hairsprings and more generally from the sets! In fact, the main provider, Nivarox, is a subsidiary of the Swatch Group...
For a few months, there was a rumor about a potential wave of panic related to the hairsprings: it stated that this component, as tiny as it is vital, as cheap as it is complicated to industrialize, would be missing with a cruelty worthy of the quartz crisis.
This anxiety became tangible when Nivarox informed TAG Heuer that the deliveries had stopped.
The product is available, the Elinvar spiral recipe is can be found in all the good watchmaking cooking books.
But the missing part is the Chef! Only a few members of Nivarox, carefully selected and submitted to security and confidentiality levels that would make a fighter pilot turn pale, know the secrets of fabrication of the magical hairsprings produced by the ETA's subsidiary.But! As the recent "TAG case" just demonstrated, most of the brands cannot spend the 5 or 10 years required to integrate the whole production chain.
http://www.watchonista.com/1/watchonista-administrator/siliciumπολυ ενδιαφερον ,αλλος ενας λογος που η Rolex φτιαχνει μονη της το hairspring!
