SPOILER ALERT!

Breitling

In 2017, Breitling SA, noted, as one of “the last family-owned watch brands of note,” was sold to “the biggest private equity firm in Europe, CVC Capital Partners” [Doerr].

The deal allotted an “80 percent stake for CVC’s Fund VI. Previous owner and CEO Théodore (Teddy) Schneider [son of Ernest Schneider] retains a 20 percent stake in the firm ….

Bloomberg reports the company was valued at more than 800 million euros ($874.6 million), and that CVC has paid about twice that. Bloomberg also reported Breitling’s sales as totaling 420 million Swiss francs ($424 million) in 2016, up from years previous (Breitling’s sales have been down since the 2008 crash).

CVC subsequently “gave the lead of the company to watch-industry veteran Georges Kern ….”

The Morgan Stanley Swiss Watch Industry Report estimated Breitling earnings at 870 million Swiss francs (U.S. $956 million) with 178,000 units sold in 2023 [Loreto]. The Report ranked this watchmaker ninth among its “Top 10 by Revenue.”

The watchmaker itself traced its founding to 1884, by Léon Breitling (1860-1914), who opened his first workshop in Saint-Imier, Switzerland. When financial and technology adaptation challenges all but wiped out the Breitling firm in 1979, third-generation head Willy Breitling is credited with having saved the brand [Richter].

That was when Ernest Frédéric Schneider [Fédération de l’industrie suisse] — owner and CEO of James Bond watchmaker Sicura SA — entered the story and turned Breitling into the producer that it is today [Richter].

Select Horology

Near the end of a decade after launch, Léon Breitling expanded his enterprise to that of a full-fledged watch factory. He moved operations to La Chaux-de-Fonds, “the watchmaking capital of Switzerland, and the world.”

Lines focused on chronographs and timers “coveted by sports enthusiasts, athletes and aviation pioneers.” At the turn-of-the-Century, Breitling released a chronograph with “two-fifths-of-a-second accuracy, unheard of at the time. Within a decade, the company had sold more than 100,000” timepieces. Over the years, successor Gaston Breitling shepherded creation of early approaches for wrist-worn chronographs that featured independent pushers that significantly advanced operational control.

Gaston passed away on July 30, 1927, and was  succeeded by his son, Willy Brietling, who “had just finished his technical and commercial training” in 1932.

Rather than manufacture luxury watches and everyday watches, the Breitling firm instead strives for technical excellence, high precision products, and watches that help people in their effort to make technical progress [Richter].

“Whereas the 1940s were characterized by military expansion, the 1950s represented the Golden Age of consumer expansion. Civil aviation took off at a meteoric pace as airliners supplanted ocean liners as the most efficient (and glamorous) means of travel ….” In 1952, the company “set out to develop a wrist-worn chronometer that would allow pilots to perform all necessary flight calculations, including average flight speed, distance traveled, fuel consumption and rate of climb. [The] idea was to adapt the … logarithmic slide rule for aviation purposes and integral it into a rotating bezel ….

Two years later, the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA) … announced the design as its official timepiece. The Navitimer — its name a combination of ‘navigation’ and ‘timer’ — was born. Breitling’s unprecedented ‘flight computer’ was quickly adopted by pilots worldwide.

The Navitimer was initially commissioned by the AOPA and not available to the public. Only after witnessing its huge success among AOPA members [was it decided] to make it part of Breitling’s catalogue ….

In 1962, the United States “had started the Mercury Program to practice and perfect its manned space flights as it worked towards a moon landing. Lt Commander Scott Carpenter was one of the 7 astronauts set to take part in the historical series of missions. Already a fan of the Navitimer from his training days, Carpenter came to Breitling with a special request: Create an astronaut’s version of the iconic pilot’s watch with an enlarged rotating bezel for use with spacesuit gloves, and a 24-hour dial to tell day from night in the darkness of space.

On May 24, 1962, Scott Carpenter orbited the earth three times with the custom Navitimer on his wrist ….  [This] marked the beginning of the ‘Cosmonaute,’ the first Swiss wrist-worn chronograph to have travelled to space.

Two years later, the Top Time collection was launched “to suit the needs of ‘young and active professionals.'”

By the late 1970s, Breitling saw maturing quartz technology as “exponentially more precise and reliable than mechanical watches, while being inexpensive to produce. “One could no longer overlook these first signs of a new chapter in watch history ….

In 1975 Breitling’s offerings included, besides mechanical watches, a quartz version of the Chronomat …. Other watches followed …. Still it was not easy to adapt to this new technology, and the resulting difficulties became greater and greater.

In August, 1979 the entire Breitling firm was closed …. Voluntarily closing the firm prevented a public auction of the remaining property [which] was sold ….

Ernest Schneider “took over the names of Breitling and Navitimer and thus had the right to go on using Breitling as the firm’s name” on April 5, 1979. Willy Breitling died the following month.

The new, present day firm was officially registered as Breitling Montres SA on November 30, 1982, and was located in Grenchen.

En Route to 007

Thunderball, the novel by Ian Fleming, was published on March 27, 1961 — having overcome a legal challenge to its underlying copyright filed ten days previous [Pearson; Amory] by Kevin McClory. Three months later, Albert R Broccoli and Harry Saltzman met with United Artists and reached an agreement to produce James Bond movies based on rights to the original books that had been secured [Rubin].

The first motion picture was to have come from the literary Thunderball [Broccoli] and Richard Maibaum completed his first draft screenplay for this on August 18, 1961 [Sellers]. Page 124 of the published text described a modified wristwatch that connected by wires to “what looked like a Rollei-flex camera,” also clandestinely reengineered, to work in combination as a geiger counter.

Ongoing litigation by Kevin McClory against Ian Fleming made United Artists “nervous about getting into a film with a controversy hanging over it” [Broccoli], and a decision was quickly changed in favor of Dr No for 1962 [Rubin]. Terence Young directed that first outing, followed a year later by From Russia with Love, but not the third, Goldfinger.

For the fourth annual EON Productions 007 film release, Thunderball was back on the slate and Mr Young was back to direct. As Cubby Broccoli recalled in his autobiography, “The court case involving Fleming and Kevin McClory had been resolved, giving Kevin the rights to film Thunderball ….

We didn’t want to see our films confused with other, perhaps inferior, products. I went over and sorted out a deal with McClory which brought Thunderball under our banner, with Kevin as the producer.

Decades later, enthusiast Raymond Benson wrote in retrospect: “McClory proved to be invaluable to Broccoli and Saltzman in making the film …. Thunderball [is] better than any of the Bond films produced after 1970″ [Benson].

With this milieu as backdrop, Breitling historian Benno Richter has advised that the “advertising Breitling did in America is worth study [Richter].

… the 20th Century-Fox motion picture studio showed close-ups of the Navitimer in various films. In the film ‘Fathom,’ the actress Raquel Welch wears a Breitling Co-Pilot, and in ‘Operation Thunderball,’ James Bond wears a Breitling Top Time when in action. All of this made for good advertising for Breitling … [Richter].

Double-0 Watch Status

Breitling first became a James Bond watch through the premier of Thunderball on December 29, 1965.

— Dell Deaton
Updated: January 1, 2023
January 14, 2024

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Bibliography

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