Producer
Stettler Sapphire AG
Swiss maker of machined synthetic-sapphire watch crystals and components.
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Watch components
Precision industrial components
Medical & optical sapphire/ruby
Intelligence
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Did you know2024
The "jewels" a mechanical watch advertises — 17 jewels, 21 jewels — are synthetic rubies, and Stettler Sapphire is a specialist maker of them. These tiny synthetic-ruby bearings sit at the movement's pivots to reduce friction and wear. The striking part is how far the same material reaches: the synthetic ruby and sapphire Stettler machines for watches also become precision bearings, nozzles, valve parts and optical windows in measuring instruments, flow meters and medical devices — and synthetic ruby is famously the crystal of the first working laser. So a watch-jewel maker's corundum components span horology, industrial instrumentation, medical equipment and photonics, with the wristwatch only the most visible of its uses. One exceptionally hard, transparent crystal does precision jobs across utterly unrelated fields, supplied by a tiny set of specialists.
Stettler Sapphire AG ↗Concentration2024
Beneath the watch industry's better-known chokepoints (movement, hairspring, silicon parts) sits another: the synthetic-jewel and sapphire-glass suppliers. Machining corundum — the second-hardest material after diamond — to micron tolerances is genuinely difficult, so only a small number of firms supply the watch industry's ruby jewels and sapphire crystals and the equivalent precision parts for instruments. Stettler is one of them. So the supply of the very components that make a mechanical watch run smoothly and stay legible is concentrated in a thin tier of corundum specialists, who also serve precision instrumentation and medical devices. The hard-crystal layer is yet another quiet dependency in a product that, from the outside, looks like pure craftsmanship.
Stettler Sapphire AG ↗