The French and English did all the heavy lifting in the early days of clock-making after 1600-1700 while the Swiss rose to dominance in the late 1800s and carried the torch until the 1970s when it went to Japan who made inexpensive electronic watches, replacing the $1000 Texas Instrument and Bulova ones as the global industry scrambled to figure out what would replace the spring you wind either bay hand or as an automatic with a self-winding rotor. Electronic and electronic an other innovations were rapid but fragile and expensive and at this time Tissot was experimenting with making watches out of plastic, which seemed insane to pretty much everybody. Swatch quartz watches, made out of plastic saved the Swiss watch industry from the "quartz invasion" and enabled the clever boys from Tissot and Omega who formed Swatch to buy Omega and Tissot and every other watch brand in Switzerland that would sell. They bought every case-maker, dial-maker, screw maker and movement and watch part company and apart from a few intendants - Vacheron, AP, Patek, Rolex and the six brands the Louis Vuitton/Hennessey/Moet consortium holds - Le Coultre, Movado and others while LVMH sold Lemania/Breguet back to Swatch when their attempt to re-brand 'Lemania' as 'Breguet' failed. Omega Tissot and Lemania had been merged since 1934 and Omega presumably had to sell Lemania to keep Omega and Tissot afloat.

Then the industry was once more dominated by Switzerland by 2000 but with a important market segment in Asian watches and American watches, but they could all compete together.

Keep in mind in that in the early part of the 20th century a watch costs two years wages yet by only by 1926 a Bulova, Rolex, Longines and other fine watches were all the same price - $37. A lot of this, most of it was mass production, assembly line methods, the rise of the "efficiency expert" and suddenly normal people could buy watches. To this day, Rolex are made by machines.

So really it's the same thing with China to a point where they're more efficient and advances in *digital* toolmaking means they've reduced a the most extreme of watch movement complications - the tourbillion from $150,000-200,000 to be - literally - a less than a thousand times cheaper.

"What if they're not reliable?"

Yeah, that's the great canard isn't it? I remember in the bicycle industry during the rise of Japanese components - esp. Shimano and Suntour. They were crazy good for little money, a tenth of the gold standard Italian parts - Campagnolo. I remember the discussion then and always heard - "they seem to be almost as good as Campagnolo. but time will tell if they are".

They were - and they cost the same as Campagnolo now, which remains tad more than a bit player these days albeit a major one. All race bikes used to be Campag. now some are, and they found again in this case an equilibrium that lets them all compete.

So I don't see what there is to complain about. If one of these watches breaks one day we'll hear about, probably from a "here, hold my beer" moment as it's not reasonable to expect the watch to just stop or fall apart or explode while on your wrist.

But this is a milestone/epoch. You can tell your kids one of these used to cost more than the house, and now they can make them a bit cheaper, but they're still very expensive.

Personally I'll wait for the chrono version.... that has a Daniels escapement. Which should not be hard given the patent has expired. That is, Daniels filed patent in 1980, and they last 17 years. Omega applied for another in 1990 as their own art (they modified it slightly, enabling a new patent and list an employee as the creator - but that expired in 2007. So... wait for it - it'll happen just as sure as Seagull makes Venus 178's for fifty cents each enabling $200 three register chronographs. They cost more than than in the 1950s in 1950s dollars.