Longines（浪琴）

Longines has been based at St Imier, Switzerland, since 1832. Its watchmaking expertise, built up over 175 years, reflects a strong devotion to tradition, elegance and the sporting world: it has generations of experience as the official timekeeper at world championships and as a partner of international sports federations. Longines is a member of The Swatch Group S.A., the world’s leading manufacturer of watches and associated products. With an excellent reputation for creating refined timepieces, the brand, whose emblem is the winged hourglass, is now established in more than 130 countries.
In 1832, Auguste Agassiz entered the world of watchmaking by establishing a partnership with a watchmaking counter in Saint-Imier. Before long, he quickly took control of the enterprise and renamed it “Agassiz & compagnie”. At the time, the company assembled watches according to the “etablissage” method, with people working at home, and developed trade links that enabled the company to sell its timepieces around the world, particularly in North America. In the 1850s, Ernest Francillon, a nephew of Agassiz, took over the management of the reputed company and looked for ways to improve the traditional manufacturing methods used in local watchmaking. His idea was to group the different operations involved in the finalisation of timepieces together in one factory, where he would use mechanical production methods to assemble and finish complete watches. To bring this project to fruition, he purchased two adjoining plots of land on the right bank of the river Suze in the Saint-Imier valley in 1866. This area of land was called “Les Longines.” To help him develop the machines he needed to perfect the watchmaking processes, Ernest Francillon employed a young relative, an engineer named Jacques David. In the 1870s, the industrial approach that Francillon had chosen proved highly successful and the factory continued to grow until the first third of the 20th century. By 1911, the Longines factory employed more than 1,100 people and its watches were being distributed around the world.

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