Word: swiss
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...community of international brokers, mostly Germans and Americans, who work out of Switzerland. These brokers have sanitized their operations so thoroughly that they never actually meet the seller. According to participants in the trade, couriers deliver the seller's metals and the buyer's cash to one of the Swiss banks specializing in the metals trade. There the metals are tested by an independent laboratory for atomic count and purity. If the metals are certified, the bankers hand them over to the buyer and deposit the cash in the seller's numbered account...
...Mercedes and Hayek's company, the Swiss Corp. for Microelectronics and Watchmaking Industries (SMH), the project is not just a technological challenge but also a huge marketing risk. After all, business-school casebooks are full of stories about fashionable companies that, in search of diversification, stretched their brand names past the breaking point. Swatch tried to extend its name to telephones, pager watches and sunglasses without great success. But Mercedes, whose sales have fallen 11% in the past three years, is eager to reach out to buyers who cannot afford its traditional cars. Already the company has unveiled plans...
Hayek may overestimate his reach -- "I am the creator of products, kingdoms and empires," he says -- but he does have expertise at taking a luxury product downscale while preserving its cachet. It was he who came up with the strategy that saved the prestigious Swiss watchmaking industry from succumbing to the Japanese hegemony in the quartz-watch business. In 1983, when he was approached for advice by a group of Swiss banks, the country had seen its share of the global watch market drop from 43% in 1974 to less than 15%. More than half the Swiss manufacturers had gone...
Hayek put up $102 million -- mostly his own money -- and led a group of investors in buying the two companies from the banks. He then merged them, effectively taking control of one-third of the Swiss watch industry, including such famous brands as Omega, Longines, Blancpain, Tissot, Rado and Hamilton. But his big coup was figuring out that a product invented before his arrival could be the high-quality, low-price, plastic quartz watch that would challenge the Japanese at the lower end of the market. The $35-to-$40 Swatch, which reduced by half the usual number of parts...
...Lebanese mother and an American father. The family moved to Switzerland when he was seven. With a degree in mathematics and $3,400 in borrowed money, Hayek started a one-man consulting firm in 1957 that developed a reputation for finding waste and mismanagement in everything from the Swiss army to the state radio. Today Hayek Engineering is a $1 billion business whose clients range from U.S. Steel and Dow Chemical to Krupp, Siemens and the Chinese government...