HMT Revival: Lessons from other state-owned watchmakers
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H D Kumaraswamy has often spoken about reviving the ailing Hindustan Machine Tools (HMT) over the last couple of months. He also appears keen on bringing HMT’s watch division back from the dead. In July this year, in Mandya, the union minister for heavy industries and steel lamented the fading out of India’s first watch brand. Earlier this month, on the occasion of the Gauri Ganesha festival, the minister reportedly bought two HMT watches, one of which he gifted to his son, JD (S) youth wing president Nikhil. Gyaneshwar Patil, the BJP MP from Khandwa, in Madhya Pradesh, is also reported to have gifted Kumaraswamy a pair of HMT watches. (While HMT Watches was liquidated in 2016, it is currently run as part of the Auxiliary Business Division and assembles rather unremarkable products.)
We don’t know how far the latest revival plan will go, or the direction it will take, but all this talk about PSUs and watches and revival packages made this reporter take a closer look at the fate of other nationalised watchmakers across the world. How many of these entities still survive? Has the phoenix risen from the ashes elsewhere and if so, what gave it wings? Watchmaking has been driven by private investment since 1735, when Blancpain, the world’s oldest watch company, was set up. The only exception to this rule was engineered by political and economic ideology: besides India, the other countries with a legacy of state-owned watchmakers were the USSR, East Germany, the former Czechoslovakia, and China.
From Russia with love
The USSR, which started its modern watchmaking journey after the Russian Revolution by buying the assets of bankrupt American watch company Deuber-Hampden, had about ten nationalised watch companies. These were set up across the confederation, from Moscow and Minsk to Petrodvorets and Chelyabinsk, and produced millions of robust watches with a utilitarian appeal and, often, space pedigree: Poljot, Slava, Strela, Vostok, Raketa… The First Moscow Watch Factory, set up as part of the Soviet Union’s first five-year plan, produced watches such as the Pobeda (‘victory’) in 1946 and the Sturmanskie watch, believed to have been worn by Yuri Gagarin on the first human space flight in 1961.
The Raketa (Russian for rocket) Big Zero, on the other hand, was a favourite of the Russian statesman and the architect of perestroika, Mikhail Gorbachev. The story goes that when he was asked to define perestroika at a summit in Italy in the late 1980s, he pointed to his Big Zero watch, with its signature oversized numerals and a big zero, and said: “It’s like on my watch; the Soviet people want to start everything from zero.” Three decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, only a few of these brands still exist.
Most of them are kept alive by licensing deals, globalised supply chains, and watch enthusiasts’ fascination for a different, and slightly quirky, philosophy of watchmaking. Poljot, now Poljot International, produces its watches in Germany, while Vostok largely makes its watches out of Lithuania, though its Christopol factory still produces classic hits such as the Amphibia and the Komandarskie on a small scale. Raketa, helped back on its feet by David Henderson-Stewart, a British entrepreneur with Russian roots, appears to be doing better. Its watches are still made at the historic St Petersburg factory, and the updated Big Zero is, in fact, available in India, with prices starting at ₹1.7 lakh.
The Saxon Revival
Unlike the USSR, East Germany, its puppet state, had an impressive watchmaking heritage, with watchmakers such as Ferdinand Adolf Lange, and Robert Muhle, brands such as Laco and Stowa, and thriving watchmaking hubs such as the towns of Glashutte, near Dresden, and Ruhla, in Thuringia. Several of these companies were corralled into collectives with rousing names such as the Volkseigener Betreib Glashutter Uhrenbetreib (GUB) or the People’s Company of Glashutte Watchmakers after WW-II. The watches they made were made available across the Eastern Bloc and exported to countries on the other side of the Iron Curtain.
Freed from the shackles of socialism after the fall of the Berlin Wall, many of these watch brands struck out on their own and began the arduous journey towards privatisation. The watches made by GUB inspired the creation of the high end Glashutte Original brand, which was acquired by the Swatch Group in 2000. Gunter Blumlein, the watch industry visionary who helped revive IWC and Jaeger-LeCoultre, came on board to re-establish A.Lange & Sohne as one of the world’s greatest watchmakers.
A. Lange & Sohne is now owned by the Swiss Richemont Group, while the premium watches made by the now family-owned Muhle Glashutte, and fliegers offered by Laco and Stowa offer, along with the rest of the German constellation of watchmakers, a solid, Bauhaus-inspired alternative to Swiss and Japanese timepieces. A similar story has been unfolding across the German border in the Czech Republic, where former nationalised and defunct watchmakers such as Chronotechna are getting a new lease of life, thanks to investors. The only country in which state- owned watchmakers appear to be doing well is China.
The public sector Seagull, located in Tianjin, is believed to be China’s biggest watchmakmer, and claims to make over 5 million movements annually. One doesn’t have to be too astute to discern patterns from this brief plunge into the history of state-owned watch companies, but what is clear is that resuscitating ailing or defunct watch brands requires both passion and a relentless entrepreneurial drive. And two, governments across the world should ideally stay out of it.
