Switzerland · since 1865

Zenith

Zenith was founded in Le Locle in 1865 by Georges Favre-Jacot, who brought the various stages of watch production under one roof. The company became known for precision and observatory chronometry, and in 1969 it presented the El Primero, one of the first automatic chronograph movements, which runs at a high frequency and can resolve tenths of a second. Staff are credited with hiding tooling during the quartz period so production could restart later. Zenith has been part of LVMH since 1999, and its range centres on the Chronomaster, Defy and Pilot lines.