I continue to view the "manufacture" vs. outsourced movement debate with a rather jaundiced eye, simply because I'm close enough to some of the material supply issues in my big company to see what's going (or NOT going) on. Generally you start out small with your whole business in-house, and if your product is sucessful you grow and make more. In the current global internet business community, however, what the labor rates are in Germany or China have a DIRECT and IMMEDIATE effect on what's going on in Switzerland. Thirty years ago this wasn't the case, but this is the way the world works now. Assuming for example, that you have 100 watchmakers and $50MM worth of production equipment, it may not always be the case that keeping ALL of those workers and equipment under your own roof will be the most profitable strategy. In the end you have the same 100 people and production equipment split up rather than together, but if that is all that has changed, then you can't make much of a case that the watches are going to be any different. There are very many fine gradations from that to having unskilled workers in China cobbling cheap watches together, and I don't think in this day and age that you can necessarily make a judgement about quality based on manufacture or outsource. It would be much more helpful, for instance, if someone likes georges could tell you if half of the ETA people used to work at Omega to begin with.
