Chinese Tourbillon Watches
Genuine Swiss tourbillon watches are extremely expensive, not everyone can afford to buy one. A mid-range Swiss Made is going to set you back at least $50,000-$100,000. Because of their high complexity and intricacy, it is very time consuming to make one of these watches, even a most basic design often takes 4-6 months. High labor price and high cost have made the price of tourbillon watches almost prohibitive to many of us.
China has already been producing over half of the timepieces for the rest of the world. However, Chinese made tourbillon watches were largely unknown until the beginning the last decade, when a number of Chinese watch manufacturers entered the market with their tourbillon watches and tourbillon movements.
Although only cost a fraction of the money of their Swiss counterparts, the quality of these Chinese tourbillon watches seems to have lived up to the expectation since their debut. Many of them have found their way into luxury watch and jewelry boutiques in the Europe and North America. Before 2010, Swiss watch makers Cecil Purnell even used the tourbillon ébauche (blank watch movements) from the Chinese Liaoning Watch Factory to produce their first generation of Swiss tourbillons.
However, when you are looking for Chinese tourbillon watches for sale on the internet, you will be surprised to see that the prices vary so much for the seemingly same watches.
There are watches being sold at less than $100 US dollars, claiming to be “tourbillon”. These watches are not tourbillons, period. Most of them are quartz watches with a window on the dial showing a deceptive “tourbillon movement” which is in fact what is called an “open-heart” or “tourbillon-style” design. The cost of making them is very low, although they might be a little more expensive than the normal quartz ones, they worth no more than $60 if the brands and their made are not significant.
Real Chinese tourbillons prices range from $500 to $100,000 US dollar, depending of quality and complexity of the watch. For $500 dollars you can buy a very basic single axis tourbillon with stainless steel case. The cheaper versions of Chinese tourbillons are often equipped with the Liaoning 5010 movement. The prestige British Horological Institute (BHI) has sourced their 150 year anniversary watch from China using this movement. They are sold on their website for as little as $600 (£380) for non-members. Interestingly there are watches with the exact same design sold at a much high price on other websites. Take this Tourous Power Reserved Stainless Steel Tourbillon for example. It claims to have a handcrafted Tourous caliber T1104, however in fact it is a watch sourced from the same OEM factory using the same Liaoning 5010 caliber, hence the exact same design. It is sold at $1,195 (reduced from $3,995). It may sound quite reasonably priced for having a nice tourbillon watch, but you won’t be happy if you have bought it and found the BHI 150 watch.
The moral of the story, when buying Chinese tourbillon watches, doing thorough research is of paramount importance. Always ask people in the known from forums and independent websites about the prices, made, and watch movements. You will be one happy tourbillon owner when you manage to buy one you love at a decent price.