HMT Watches : How India’s Timekeepers Lost The Track Of Time
HMT Watches : How India’s Timekeepers Lost The Track Of Time A strategic and financial story of HMT Watches — from national symbol to monopoly to the company that died twice, a decade apart 14Registrar of Companies. Section 248(2). Routine language. A company struck off the register for having no operations. Almost nobody noticed. Why would they? Everyone already thought HMT Watches had died ten years earlier. That's the strange thing about this story, it has two endings, a decade apart, and the real one is the one nobody wrote about. I want to tell you about a watch company. Not because watches are inherently fascinating, but because this one company managed to be, at different points in its life, a national symbol, a monopoly, a cautionary tale, a zombie, and finally, a footnote and somehow took seventy years to get through all five. The Watch as Nation-Building Picture India in the early 1960’s. The country is young, industrializing, and self-consciously t...
