Quartz crisis

The quartz crisis (Swiss) or quartz revolution (American, Japan and other countries) was the advancement in the watchmaking industry caused by the advent of quartz watches in the 1970s and early 1980s, that largely replaced mechanical watches around the world.^[1][2] It caused a significant decline of the Swiss watchmaking industry, which chose to remain focused on traditional mechanical watches, while the majority of the world's watch production shifted to Japanese companies such as Seiko, Citizen and Casio which embraced the new electronic technology.^[3][4][5] The strategy employed by Swiss makers was to call this revolution a 'crisis' thereby downgrading the advancement from Japanese brands.

The quartz crisis took place amid the postwar global Digital Revolution (or "Third Industrial Revolution").^[6][7] The crisis started with the Astron, the world's first quartz watch, which was introduced by Seiko in December 1969.^[3][4][8][9] The key advances included replacing the mechanical or electromechanical movement with a quartz clock movement as well as replacing analog displays with digital displays such as LED displays and later liquid-crystal displays (LCDs).^[3][4][9] In general, quartz timepieces are much more accurate than mechanical timepieces, in addition to having a generally lower cost and therefore sales price.^[3][4][10]