Nostalgia sets in as time runs out for India’s beloved watch

At its peak, in the 1960s and 1970s, HMT – "Timekeepers to the nation" – made eight or nine out of every 10 timepieces sold in the country, but its traditional approach to design that for years made it so popular and growing foreign competition eventually led to its downfall.

An advertisement for HMT watches. The Indian company, which is also known for manufacturing farm machinery, has ceased mass production of timepieces.

NEW DELHI // India’s first indigenous manufacturer of timepieces, the state-owned HMT Watches, will soon wind down, its nostalgic appeal swamped by mounting losses and fierce competition.

At its peak, in the 1960s and 1970s, HMT — Hindustan Machine Tools — made eight or nine out of every 10 watches sold in India. In total, according to one estimate, HMT has made more than 100 million watches. Its unfussy designs and robust mechanical innards made for practical and lasting gifts: to a young college graduate, or to a retiring employee, or to newly married couples.

But that same lack of flash may have contributed to the company’s demise. In 2012-13, HMT registered sales of 110 million rupees (Dh6.6m), but a loss of 2.4 billion rupees. The previous year, its loss stood at 2.2bn rupees.

HMT was founded in 1953, originally to manufacture tractors and industrial machinery, which it still does, with some success. The timepiece division started in 1961, in collaboration with Citizen, the Japanese watch manufacturer.

HMT had competitors, notably another local brand called Timestar. But the government’s ban on importing Swiss watches, which lasted until the mid-1980s, kept HMT’s fortunes aloft.

“Timekeepers to the nation,” HMT’s slogan ran. Demand was so high that customers sometimes had to wait for months to obtain the model of their choice.

Unlike many other government-owned companies between the 1960s and 1980s, HMT had a reputation for innovation. It manufactured its own mechanism, even as other watch companies purchased them from elsewhere, to slip into their own casings. It created a watch with a Braille dial, for the visually impaired. It even launched the first quartz watch in India in 1981, keeping abreast of a worldwide trend.

But in those early days of quartz, the prices of these new watches proved too high for customers, so HMT kept its focus on mechanical watches. Later in the 1980s, as other watch manufacturers moved into quartz and the prices of such timepieces dropped, HMT was left lagging behind — the beginning of the end.

"HMT's mistake, ironically enough, may have been that it reacted to the quartz boom too soon," Sidin Vadukut, a columnist who writes on watches for the business newspaper Mint, said last week, in one of the obituaries for the company.

Perhaps appropriately, HMT’s dominance in the market was usurped by another Indian company, Titan. Founded in 1984, as a part of the Tata conglomerate of companies, Titan is now the fifth-largest watchmaker in the world, with a market share in India of 60 per cent.

In contrast to HMT through the 1990s and 2000s, Titan innovated quickly and intelligently, often with the help of engineers who formerly worked at HMT.

Titan pushed its quartz lines when quartz was hot, dropped prices of entry-level models, introduced premium watches, and incorporated internationally popular styles. The company has been so successful that, three years ago, it was able to acquire Favre-Leuba, one of Switzerland’s oldest watch manufacturers, for €2m (Dh9.5m).

For a while, HMT forged on thanks to its inadvertently retro-chic designs and the nostalgia that Indians felt for its home-grown charms. But its shops have increasingly been thinly stocked; instead, HMT’s classic watches are more reliably found on online marketplaces like eBay, retailing for anywhere between 1,000 rupees (Dh60) and 8,000 rupees, depending upon vintage.

India still retains a soft spot for HMT, though, as Prateek Shujanya discovered last year.

Mr Shujanya, a 26-year-old watch aficionado and medical student, made friends with people at the HMT plant in Ranibagh, in the northern state of Uttarakhand. When he mentioned to them that many of his friends loved the old White Pilot model, he learned that the factory could run a custom order if the numbers were large enough.

Encouraged, Mr Shujanya turned to online watch forums to solicit the 500 orders he needed. “People saw this and then asked for custom runs of their own, in batches of 200 or so,” he said. “That HMT plant must have ended up making around 2,000 or 3,000 White Pilots last year.”

“There are so many people in love with HMT still, who wanted those watches,” Mr Shujanya said. “It’s just that the company never went that extra mile to adapt to the times.”