Chinese watches turning toward position of strength

The four-day 23rd China Watch and Clock Fair closed in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, on Sunday.

The event attracted about 500 enterprises from more than 60 countries and regions and 60,000 visitors, making it one of the largest watch and clock fairs in the world.

China is fast becoming an important hub of watch making, a distinction most often associated with Switzerland. Some of the top Chinese companies in the industry have even made it a chief ambition to catch up with their Swiss counterparts.

Zhang Hongguang, vice-chairman of the China Horologe Association, a national quasi-official organization used to supervise the industry's development, expressed cautious optimism during an interview with China Daily.

"It's a good wish to have, but we have a long way to go to catch up with the Swiss," Zhang said. "One of the Chinese horologe industry's chief faults is that it lacks influential brands. Many shoppers prefer Swiss luxury brands, which leave less room for our own products."

Some domestic mechanical brands, such as "Beijing", "Shanghai" and "Sea-gull", were popular among Chinese people from the mid-1950s, when Chinese horologe industry was founded, to the 1980s.

In that latter decade, large numbers of quartz watches were imported into China market from Japan and the domestic industry began to struggle. The country's open market also proved attractive to Swiss brands, bringing more competition for domestic manufacturers.

Zhang said China was home to 38 factories that made mechanical watches in the 1980s, but now is only to nine.

The industry has since embarked on a campaign to regain its strength. In 1995, the Beijing Watch Factory became the first such operation in China to develop tourbillion, an important element in the manufacture of high-end mechanical watches, and Chinese manufacturers have continued to introduce important techniques in recent years.

"Some people in the industry say Chinese mechanical watches have been of a very good quality," Zhang said. "They think that the lack of a good brand is only a problem and look forward to making everything different after spending more on promotions and advertisements.

"It's too bad that this idea is not true."

Zhang said he thinks the differences between the Swiss watch industry and the Chinese run much deeper.

"We don't have many watch technicians of a high quality in China," Zhang said. "It is not only an issue of technique, but of art."

In June, the association presented the title of "Chinese Horologe Masters" for the first time to 12 people in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. The honor is now to be bestowed once every other year.

Zhang, though, said he is worried that fewer qualified candidates will be found for it next year.

"We don't have professional institutions to nurture watch artisans in China," Zhang said. "There used to be colleges in China that offered classes on watch-making, but those were later canceled when the industry ran into difficulties. Most young people don't have the patience to learn these skills.”

Zhang said he thinks it's important to have a systematic program that can be used to train more people in the industry.

"The mechanical watch industry is an important indicator of a country's industrial level because of its demands for various skills, instruments and techniques."

Zhang also said he thinks the situation in China gives watchmakers more choices.

"Since the Chinese watch market is so huge, we still cannot only focus on high-end mechanical watches, which are at the top of the pyramid."

According to the association's statistics, 753 million watches were made in China in 2011, but only 3 percent were mechanical watches. The rest were quartz watches.

"Having a watch is not just a way of knowing the time, but it's also not just a luxury," Zhang said. "Different people have their own reasons for owning watches."

Zhang says the importance of watches extends far beyond people's daily lives. He is proud that domestic watches, for instance, contributed to the Shenzhou IX space mission by helping to keep the project's clock accurate.

"So, I am still very confident about the future of Chinese watches, even though we still have so much work to do."