The commercial quartz wristwatch arrives at the end of the 1960s, and within roughly fifteen years the economics of watchmaking are unrecognisable. A quartz movement keeps time an order of magnitude better than a fine mechanical calibre while costing a fraction to produce.
The effect on Switzerland was structural rather than simply competitive. Firms whose value lay in escapement finishing, poising and positional adjustment found those skills priced out of the mass market, and consolidation and closures followed across the ébauche and finishing trades.
Japanese manufacturers, already strong in mechanical production, moved decisively into electronic movements and treated the two families as parallel product lines rather than rivals.
What returned from the 1980s onward was a mechanical watch sold as craft, history and mechanical interest — not as the most accurate instrument available. That reframing explains why complications, finishing and provenance dominate present-day mechanical discussion.
For researchers the practical consequence is archival: many firms changed hands, merged or dissolved in this period, so records for a 1960s calibre and its 1990s successor may sit in entirely different archives, or may not survive at all.