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Business News: Swiss Authorities Weigh ETA Sales Ban
According to Swiss newspaper Schweiz am Wochenende (via Reuters), Switzerland’s Competition Commission, a federal body that oversees competition and antitrust matters, is considering an outright ban of movements sales by ETA to third parties, in other words brands outside of the Swatch Group, starting January 2020. Also known as COMCO, or its German acronym WEKO, the agency is expected to deliver a verdict on December 19 . No explicit reason was cited for the potential ban, but it was implied that a recent COMCO report on the industry structure of the movement business is the reason. It is possible that COMCO believes the number of alternatives to ETA is sufficient that the watch industry would be better served over the long term by forcing watch brands to switch away from ETA. COMCO has long tussled with Switzerland’s biggest movement maker, in a dispute that began 17 years ago, when ETA announced it would gradually halt sales of ebauches, or movement blanks, to brands not owned by its parent company, Swatch Group. Because ETA was, and still is, Switzerland’s largest movement, reputedly producing some five million movements a year, its decision was regarded by COMCO as anticompetitive. And the wider Swatch Group – which is the country’s largest watchmaking conglomerate – produces perhaps a third of the components needed for watch movements in the entire industry. In the subsequent years ETA and COMCO reached various agreements over movement supply, with the l...
