The story
Early history
In 1848, Louis Brandt founded the company that would become Omega in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland. He assembled key-wound precision pocket watches from parts supplied by local craftsmen. He sold his watches from Italy to Scandinavia by way of England, his chief market. In 1877, his sons Louis-Paul and César joined him, and the company name was changed to Louis Brandt & Fils. In 1894, his two sons Louis-Paul and César developed their own in-house manufacturing and total production control system that allowed component parts to be interchangeable. Watches developed with these techniques were marketed under the Omega brand of Louis Brandt & Frere. By 1903, the success of the Omega brand led Louis Brandt & Frere to rename their company to the Omega Watch Co.
Re-organization
Louis-Paul and César Brandt both died in 1903, leaving one of Switzerland's largest watch companies — with 240,000 watches produced annually and employing 800 people — in the hands of four young people, the oldest of whom, Paul-Emile Brandt, was not yet 24. The economic difficulties brought on by the First World War led Paul-Emile Brandt to work in 1925 towards the union of Omega and Tissot, then to their merger in 1930 into the group SSIH, Geneva.
Under Brandt's leadership and Joseph Reiser's from 1955, the SSIH Group continued to grow and multiply, absorbing or creating some fifty companies, including Lanco and Lemania, manufacturer of the most famous Omega chronograph movements. By the 1970s, SSIH had become Switzerland's top producer of finished watches and third in the world. Up to this time, Omega outsold Rolex, its main Swiss rival in the luxury watch segment, in the race for "King of Swiss Watch brands", although Rolex sold at a higher price point. Omega tended to be more revolutionary and more professionally focused, while Rolex watches were more ‘evolutionary’ and famous for their mechanical pieces and branding.
While Omega and Rolex had dominated in the pre-quartz era, this changed in the 1970s during the quartz crisis, when Japanese watch manufacturers, such as Seiko and Citizen, rose to dominance due to their use of quartz movements. In response, Rolex continued concentrating on its expensive mechanical chronometers where its expertise lay (though it did have some experimentation in quartz), while Omega tried to compete in the quartz watch market with its own quartz movements.
Recent development
Weakened by the severe monetary crisis and recession of 1975 to 1980, SSIH was bailed out by banks in 1981. During this period, Seiko expressed interest in acquiring Omega, but nothing came of the talks.
Switzerland's other watch making giant Allgemeine Schweizerische Uhrenindustrie AG (ASUAG), supplier of a large range of Swiss movements and watch assemblies, was in economic difficulty. It was the principal manufacturer of Ébauche (unfinished movements) and owner, through their sub-holding company General Watch Co (GWC), of various other Swiss watch brands including Longines, Rado, Certina, Hamilton Watch Company and Mido. After drastic financial restructuring, the R&D departments of ASUAG and SSIH merged production operations at the ETA complex in Granges. The two companies completely merged forming ASUAG-SSIH, a holding company, in 1983.
Two years later, the holding company was taken over by a group of private investors led by Nicolas Hayek. Renamed Société de Microélectronique et d'Horlogerie (SMH), the new group over the next decade proceeded to become one of the top watch producers in the world. In 1998 it became The Swatch Group, which now manufactures Omega and other brands such as Blancpain, Swatch, and Breguet.
Omega experienced a resurgence with advertisements that focused on product placement strategies, such as in the James Bond 007 films; the character had previously worn a Rolex Submariner but switched to the Omega Seamaster Diver 300M with GoldenEye (1995), and later an Omega Planet Ocean and Aqua Terra. Omega adopted many elements of Rolex's business model (i.e. premium pricing, tighter controls of dealer pricing, increasing advertising, etc.), which succeeded in increasing Omega's market share and name recognition to become a direct competitor to Rolex.
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In 2019, Omega licensed its name and branding to Marcolin for a collection of men's and women's optical frames and sunglasses.
In March 2022, Omega collaborated with sibling company Swatch, both of which are owned by The Swatch Group, to release a budget version of its iconic Omega Speedmaster Moonwatch. The so-called "MoonSwatch", available in 11 colors, is made of bioceramic (a mixture of ceramic and castor oil) and priced at $260 / £207, well below the $5,250 price (as of March 2022) of the least expensive Omega Speedmaster Moonwatch.
As of 2024, Omega's boutique network includes more than 350 stores across the World.
From Wikipedia’s article on Omega SA, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4