Rolex
Rolex SA () is a Swiss luxury watchmaker. Originally founded as "Wilsdorf and Davis" by Hans Wilsdorf and Alfred Davis in London in 1905, the company registered "Rolex" as the brand name of its watches in 1908. In 1919, the company moved its base of operations to Geneva, Switzerland in order to avoid heavy taxation from a recovering post-war Britain, and "Montres Rolex S.A." was registered as the new company name by Hans Wilsdorf in Geneva in 1920. Since 1960, the company has been owned by the Hans Wilsdorf Foundation, a private family trust.
Rolex Oysterquartz
At the end of the 1970s, the Swiss watch industry was being affected by the Quartz crisis, and Japanese watchmakers supplied the world market with large quantities of quartz watches. Rolex decided to put forward a new line of watches to combat this situation, and the Datejust Oysterquartz was born. Although not designed to turn the company’s tradition of producing mechanical watches upside down, it faced the international, namely Asian, markets seeking to keep alive interest in Swiss luxury watchmaking; an industry that seemed at that moment to have been completely absorbed by the Japanese quartz watch.