History

www.buyaswatch.co.uk is an independent website dedicated to providing the very latest watches from the world's number one designer and manufacturer - Swatch.  Here is their history

It already fills whole libraries. And it is far from finished. Here is the on-going story:

Swatch overcomes crisis and leads to the survival of the Swiss watch industry.

In the mid-seventies, the Swiss watch industry was in the midst of its worst crisis ever. Technologically speaking, the Japanese competition had been outclassed in 1979 with the launch of the "Delirium," the world´s thinnest wristwatch with a limited number of components. But the event that marked the upturn in the industry´s fortunes was the founding of SMH, the Swiss Corporation for Microelectronics and Watchmaking Industries. And its answer to the crisis was Swatch-a slim plastic watch with only 51 components (instead of the usual 91 parts or more) that combined top quality with a highly affordable price. It first went on sale in 1983. Since this time, it has gone on to become the most successful wristwatch of all time, and The Swatch Group, the parent company, is the largest and most dynamic watch company in the world.

For many years, new developments have been taking place alongside the standard Swatch watch in plastic-from Irony (the metal Swatch) to the Swatch SKIN Chrono (the world's thinnest chronograph) to Swatch Snowpass (a watch with a built-in access control function which can be used as a ski pass at many ski resorts throughout the world), and Swatch Beat (featuring the revolutionary Internet Time).

Swatch was the Official Timekeeper of the ATHENS 2004 Olympic Games. Outstanding technical capabilities and advances in the fields of science and technology were already proven by Swatch during its role as the Official Timekeeper in both the 1996 Atlanta Centennial Olympic Games and the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games.