As you take a ferry through Victoria Harbour, you can see towering skyscrapers and a variety of huge neon signs on the shore, which are known as the world's four major advertising prime locations along with Ginza in Tokyo, Japan, the Champs Elysées in France, and Times Square in New York, USA.
If you travel back in time to Hong Kong in 1982, you'll see huge Citizen billboards overlooking the cosmopolitan city that has yet to return to its mother's bosom in almost the highest and most conspicuous location.
It was just a year after Japan became the world's largest watch producer, and they defeated Swiss-made with a quartz revolution.
In 1981, a total of 108 million watches were produced in Japan, of which 35 million were produced by Citizen.
10 years ago, the president of Citizen Yamada said that Japan would beat Switzerland to become the world's largest watch producer within five years, although it took five years more to achieve this goal than he expected, but from being pressed to the ground by Swiss manufacturing to surpassing them, the development of Japanese watches has far exceeded most people's expectations.
Citizen was officially founded in 1930, but its history can be traced back to the establishment of the Japan Institute of Timepieces in 1918, founded by a founder named Yamazaki Kameyoshi.
At that time, most of the pocket watches or watches in circulation came from Switzerland or the United States, and it was far more difficult for large-scale production of pocket watches than wall clocks for watch manufacturers in Tokyo, Osaka or Nagoya.
The first to try to make a pocket watch in Japan was osaka Toki Manufacturing Company, they imported equipment from Britain and the United States, invited mechanics, and produced the first pocket watch in 1895 - sakameri, but because of the gap in technical level, this pocket watch could not face the market at all, so the company closed down 7 years later.
Also in 1895, there was a company that made its own pocket watch Time Keeper, it was Seikosha, with the help of the Swiss, it became one of the few companies in Japan at that time that could make a profit with a pocket watch.
Until the outbreak of the First World War, the demand on the front line stimulated the development of the Japanese pocket watch industry, and after the end of the First World War, the Number of Japanese pocket watch companies grew from 6 before the war to 15, including citizen city, the protagonist of our story today.
Perhaps seeing hope in Seikosha, Yamazaki Kameyoshi thought he would also have the opportunity to produce a product that was cheaper than Swiss manufacturing, so he set up his own research institute in Tokyo in 1918 and introduced a batch of Swiss machines.
In 1923, Yamazaki took his pocket watch to a pocket watch contest held in Tokyo, along with Swiss pocket watches, American pocket watches and seiko's nine pocket watches.
After three days of rigorous testing, the performance of Japanese pocket watches in timing accuracy was completely defeated by Westerners, and there was even a large error between the same brand and the same model of pocket watches.
The daily difference of foreign pocket watches is 4 seconds, the daily difference of Seiko's 9 pocket watches varies from 6-62 seconds, and the daily average difference of Citizen is 48 seconds.
Although there is still a gap with Switzerland, the defeat of Seiko as soon as he debuted has allowed Citizen to gain a lot of attention.
Coupled with the later praise of Yamazaki's pocket watch made by Emperor Hirohito of Japan, and the fact that the mayor of Tokyo personally named it Citizen, hoping that it would become a product that every citizen could afford, all this made Citizen grow rapidly.
Until 1930, after the reorganization and expansion of the Institute of Commercial and Industrial Cooperatives, it was officially renamed Citizen Timepiece Co., Ltd. Under the leadership of the new president, Yonzaburo Nakajima, Citizen moved towards the watch field.
Before the outbreak of World War II, the entire Japanese watch industry was in a stage of rapid development under the leadership of companies such as Citizen, and the output of watches in Japan had reached 5 million in 1939.
However, as Japanese Emperor Hirohito launched a war of aggression, all watch manufacturers became part of the war machine, and it was not until the end of World War II that they slowly got back on track.
In 1946, Citizen welcomed its new president, Eiichi Yamada, and after entering the 1950s, Citizen began to accelerate the gap with Swiss manufacturing under his leadership.
In 1952, Citizen launched Japan's first calendar watch, in 1956 launched Japan's first shock-proof watch Parashock, in order to demonstrate the shockproof effect, Citizen employees rented helicopters around the country to play with high-altitude projectiles.
A similar marketing routine was used in 1959 for Parawater, Japan's first waterproof watch, which was waterproof to a depth of 50 meters and sold for about half the monthly salary of high school graduates.
The watch, also called Kuroshio'64, was originally named after a project jointly organized by the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force and the Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology to study ocean currents off The Southeast Coast of Japan with drift bottles.
Citizen heard the news and decided to work with them, tying the yellow buoy to the watch, then throwing them into the Pacific Ocean in 1964, and the salvaged watch was still functioning a year later.
While the products continued to upgrade, Eiichi Yamada was also actively expanding its sales channels, and in 1958 Citizen began to export to China, and in 1960 they signed a cooperation agreement with Bulova in the United States, which was a very important turning point for Citizen.
At that time, Bulova was planning to promote its new product to the market, that is, the world's first all-electronic watch, The Aktron Accutron, which used electronically driven tuning fork timing, 10 times more accurate than mechanical watches, and was loved by the market as soon as it was launched, from 1961 to 1977, the watch sold about 5 million units.
In 1964, Citizen, which also had a strong interest in electronic watches, also set up its own technical laboratory, and two years later, they launched their own electronic watches, powered by silver oxide batteries, with a range of more than a year.
If Bulova's Accutron led Citizen into the electronic age, Seiko's Quartz Astron in 1969 led the entire watch industry into the quartz age.
Quartz watches were invented by Bell Labs, and in 1928 they discovered that they could use the regular vibration of quartz crystals to express time, and for a long time thereafter, watchmakers were thinking about how to make this quartz smaller and smaller, preferably in the watch.
It wasn't until 1969 that Seiko finally came up with the answer – Quartz Astron.
The watch sold for 450,000 yen, which was about $1,200 at the time.
Unlike Bulova, who initially patented its own technology to prevent other merchants from imitating the trend, Seiko published most of the patented technology in the process of developing quartz watches for free, so Citizen entered the quartz era in 1973 with a weekly error of 1 second.
That is, a year later, the quartz revolution set off by Seiko swept the world, and watches slowly changed from luxury goods to electronic products that most people can afford to consume.
At the same time, Citizen's previous investment in electronic watches has paid off, and from 1975 to 1981, almost every year Citizen will come up with four amazing products.
In December 1975, they unveiled the world's most accurate watch at the time, the Quartz Crystron Mega, a quartz watch with a vibration frequency of 4194304 hertz, with an unusually high frequency that made it have an annual error of only 3 seconds, compared with an average annual error of 15 seconds for other quartz watches.
However, the battery life of high-power simultaneous batteries is only a few months.
And the price of this watch is as high as 4.5 million yen, which is about 70,000 US dollars to this day.
Despite this, the Mega sold more than 3,000 copies, and its appearance meant that Citizen was at the forefront of technology at this time, from being far behind Swiss manufacturing at the beginning to being part of the quartz revolution, and Citizen became one of the leaders of this new movement.
A year later, Citizen launched a solar watch with 8 solar cells on its dial, which opened the way for the subsequent photodynamic technology. By 1978, in addition to being cheaper, more accurate, and had a higher endurance, the quartz revolution had entered another important chapter, thinner and lighter.
This year, Citizen launched the world's first watch, the Exceted Gold, with a movement thickness of less than 1 mm, and the entire watch was only 4 mm thick.
In response, the Swiss ETA launched the world's first watch with a thickness of less than 2 millimeters in 1979, but although they won the weight loss war, the overall situation is gone.
Throughout 1974 to 1981, under the impact of the quartz revolution, the production of Swiss watches was reduced from 84 million to 30.2 million, countless people lost their jobs, and the traditional Swiss mechanical watch industry was on the verge of collapse.
Also in 1981, compared to the Swiss 30.2 million, the entire Japanese watch production reached 108 million, of which Citizen produced 3500 watches.
After joining forces to beat the Swiss, what remains is the civil war between Citizen and Seiko, in 1986, Citizen beat Seiko to become the world's largest watch manufacturer with an annual output of 80 million, engaged in manufacturing in Japan, no black technology you are embarrassed to go out to mix, especially in the competitors there is also the existence of G-shock.
In 1995, Citizen launched its most important product, the Eco Drive, this time it was no longer sunlight, but all the light could provide kinetic energy for the watch, as long as it was worn on the hand, there was no need to worry about it running out of electricity.
In the same year, Citizen also launched the A660 movement, which served its own top watch, chronomaster.
With the performance of the explosion of the photodynamic watches after the advent, by 2001, citizen's annual revenue reached $3.27 billion, and for every four watches produced in the world, one or one of the movements came from citizen.
Such a huge production volume is due to the automated production lines that Citizen has been using since the 1970s.
In the case of the Iida factory, the production line here can produce a complete quartz movement every second, and there are 10 such production lines in Iida.
As one of the most vertically integrated companies in the industry, Citizen has now owned a complete set of self-developed equipment from the earliest relying on Swedish equipment for watchmaking, in addition to their complete abandonment of manual manufacturing, more high-end series such as Chronomaster or Campanola are assembled by hand by watchmakers.
Inside Citizen, these watchmakers are known as Meister, and to become a higher-level Super Mesiter, you must have more than 30 years of work experience.
In addition to the income generated by watches, Citizen also has a very important side business - machine tool production, which has been slowly abandoning the Equipment of the Swiss since the 1940s in favor of producing and selling their own machine tools.
In each year's financial report, Citizen's machine tool business accounts for about 20% of the shares, spanning multiple industries such as medical services, automotive engines and aviation parts production.
For example, from April to December 2020, total sales were 62.1 billion yen, of which the watch business accounted for 26.8% and the machine tool sales accounted for 17.8%.
The rest of the revenue comes from the sale of movements or other parts and electronic products, it is worth mentioning that many watch manufacturers do not develop their own movements, but Citizen established its own movement brand Miyota as early as 1959.
In 1981 they launched the market-oriented and represent the industry's highest standard 2035 movement, this movement sold 1.7 billion in the next 18 years, today's Miyota almost firmly grasp the low-end movement market, in addition to the Swiss ETA there is also a Chinese manufacturer of automatic movements, is also very popular, I don't know if you can guess who it is.
As we said above, Citizen was the world's largest watch manufacturer until the end of the 20th century, but how did City grow in the 21st century?
The overall decline in the watch market is on the one hand, Swiss manufacturing did not completely die in the quartz revolution, but to label quartz watches with low-end goods on the one hand, the competition from G-shock and Seiko is also on the one hand, but for Citizen, including G-shock and Seiko, the biggest impact comes from Apple's smart watches, since 2015, the watch sales of these three companies have dropped significantly.
Apple Watch shipments in 2019 are far greater than the entire Swiss watch brand combined.
In addition to Apple's stimulation, the reasons for forcing Citizen to quickly break into the smart watch market may also be due to the epidemic, in the past 1-2 years, the profitability of Citizen watch business and machine tool exports have shown a downward trend, of which the orders for machine tool business have decreased by about 30%.
The Double 11 Chinese market in 2020 has brought a large wave of traffic to Citizen, which has also made the latter realize that it has been lacking in e-commerce.
Of course, in addition to natural disasters, Citizen itself has also had "counterfeiting problems" in operation, such as tampering with product life data, although Citizen fired three senior executives involved, but this move still made Japanese companies with craftsman spirit seriously frustrated in overseas markets.
Including Citizen's photodynamic watches, we often talk about the black technology of some companies, but these black technologies are ultimately just a display of achievements, and what drives them to develop this black technology is the creativity that has been constantly seeking change with the changes in the market.
Although It cannot be said that Citizen has single-handedly changed the development process of the watch industry, they have indeed influenced the pattern of today's watch industry and have a place in the mid-market market.
In addition to Citizen, many Chinese companies are now trying to break the wrist of the smart watch market and Apple after the rise of 5G, and although the opponent is very strong, the consequence of hasty challenge may be ruthless ridicule after failure.
But the emergence of competitors is always a good thing for consumers.
In fact, as early as 2002, Citizen launched the world's first bluetooth-enabled watch, and in 2012 also launched a solar watch that supported Bluetooth, but all this was only a shallow attempt, until 2018, their president Toshio Toshio Tokura publicly stated that Citizen decided to seriously enter the smart watch market, which was like the "declaration of war" of the Swiss.
Then in November 2020, the Citizen CZ Smart was introduced, and while it wasn't special in terms of functionality, it wasn't easy for a traditional watchmaking company.
The story of Citizen began in the 1920s, and a full century later, his opponents are not only Seiko, Swiss-made, but now Apple.
In the face of the complicated situation in front of him, Toshio Tokura's answer was very brief: Moving forward is the key!