In a recent interview with Tag Heuer:
You introduced your new chronograph Calibre 1887 in December 2009. The movement quickly sparked discussions among connoisseurs when it be- came apparent that the base caliber came from Seiko, a fact that you hadn’t made clear right from the start. Could you clarify this issue now: exactly which parts of this caliber do you make yourself and which parts come from Seiko?Seiko sold us the rights to the intellectual property. The background is as follows: Seiko applied for patents for a project in the late 1990s; based on these patents, Seiko Instruments, which is part of the Seiko Group, developed a genuine manufacture movement, which it produced in very small numbers in Japan. Seiko sold a few watches with this caliber around the year 2000 solely in Japan.
When we began looking for options for constructing our own chronograph, we had to orient ourselves according to various specifications. Our movement would have to be an integrated chronograph caliber with a column wheel, but not like Zenith’s El Primero and not with a pace of 36,000 semi-oscillations per hour. It would have to differ from the chronograph movements that we’d al- ready used and we also wanted it to be slimmer than the Valjoux 7750. These specs resulted in technical requirements that were very similar to the ones de- scribed in Seiko’s patent documents. So instead of starting from square one and reinventing the wheel, we contacted Seiko and asked them if we could purchase certain elements of the intellectual property rights to this caliber. That would enable us to save two or three years’ time. The performance of the watches that Seiko had manufactured for the Japanese market was very good and the construction was exactly what we needed.
Nevertheless, after we’d reached an agreement with Seiko, we still had to industrialize everything anew. There’s a big difference between making a few thousand units via manufacture work as Seiko had done in Japan on the one hand, and our plans on the other hand, which envisioned producing tens of thousands of calibers per year. So starting with the patent, we proceeded, as it were, from a blank page, organizing the entire construction according to our planned production. As a result, our movement differs from Seiko’s caliber in many important details, for example, the diameter, the height, the base plate and the bridges. And unlike Seiko’s escapement, ours is supplied by Nivarox. The two calibers also differ with regard to the production process and the machinery. So, although our caliber is constructively based on the same ideas as Seiko’s, it’s nevertheless a genuine TAG Heuer caliber. And needless to say, it’s “Swiss made.”
Which components do you make and which parts does Seiko deliver?Among other parts, we produce the base plate, the bridges and the inner portion of the rotor. In addition to that, we also collaborate with 22 suppliers. One of them is Seiko Instruments, from which we order some of the stamped parts. The other 21 suppliers are all Swiss, for example Kif for the shock absorbers and Nivarox for the escapement. Fleury, one of Switzerland’s best manufacturers, produces the machines that we use for our own production. They deliver to us the machines for dry-milling brass components such as plates and bridges. By eliminating the use of oil, we don’t need to cleanse the parts between two sequential processing steps: that saves time and money, which is an important factor for big-series production like ours.
