Japan CBM Corp. was established in 1964, and started selling watches under the Q&Q brand in 1976. They released the Q&Q branded watches in October 1976 to the world markets. They were designed to be a mass market brand that made extremely affordable, and decent quality watches, especially considering the prices. My impression is that Q&Q represented different things to different markets depending on where they wanted to position themselves relative to rival brands. "Q&Q" apparently stands for "Quality and Quantity", and the "CBM" in "Japan CBM Corp." stands for "Citizen Business Machines". In 1999, Q&Q sales reached 20 million pieces in quantity and are today one of the biggest watch brands in the world. In 2002 they became entirely owned by Citizen Watch Co, and from April 2009 their operations were absorbed into Citizen Watch. Japan CBM did not actually build anything themselves, but simply subcontract, generally within the Citizen Group, although some of their mechanical models for the Indian market featured Chinese movements. Vintage Q&Q mechanical watches were made by Citizen Subsidiary “Premier Precision Ltd.” in Hong Kong and South Korea. Strangely, Premier Precision are a quartz LCD module manufacturer. The watch featured here today is a manual wind with a tiny mechanical Citizen movement in its mid-size case. It is an early model and was most likely manufactured during the "quartz crisis" era as an attempt to complete with the onslaught of Quartz watches flooding the market by making a low-cost watch using existing mechanical technology. Comments are closed.
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Old Time WatchesI enjoy collecting mechanical (manual wind and automatic) and early electric and quartz timepieces. I take great pleasure in researching and writing about the companies and people that created these beautiful watches. PF
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September 2018
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