Earlier this year, Tissot president François Thiébaud explained to Europa Star that he wanted to increase the company’s profit margins by producing greater quantities rather than increasing prices. It was clear that he intended Tissot to remain a producer of quality watches at affordable prices, rather than gradually increase the average prices as other brands in the Swatch Group have done.

With Tissot’s timepieces rumoured to by flying off the shelves at a rate of several hundred per month in its highest store in the world, the modest boutique at the Jungfraujoch in Switzerland that opened earlier this year, it’s clear that Tissot still has the power to drive growth through quantity as well as quality.

Luxury Automatic by Tissot

Further volumes (and even more quality) is set to come in the form of a brand-new movement that Tissot has now unveiled. The Powermatic 80 uses a new type of spring barrel and escapement technology to increase the power reserve of the movement to an impressive 80 hours. The index assembly has also been removed from the movement, leading to an increase in precision. Such is the precision of this new movement that Tissot also offers it in a COSC-certified chronometer version.

Tissot’s unbeatable economies of scale (lest we forget, Tissot’s new logistics centre, which opened earlier this year, is geared to cope with a volume of between five and six million watches per year), allow the brand to offer this new self-winding movement for under a thousand Swiss francs — even in the chronometer version — in the stainless-steel and PVD gold Tissot Luxury Automatic models that will be the first to use the Powermatic 80.

The brand has so far been careful not to reveal too many specifics about this important new movement, but rest assured that Europa Star will be bringing you more details in a future issue of the magazine.