New luxury watch components group Chaumont establishes its base in Neuchâtel

Italian investment company Vam Investment and Umberto Macchi di Cellere, former chief executive of Bulgari Horlogerie, have announced the creation of Chaumont Group, a new player in the high-end watch market. Based in Neuchâtel, the group currently brings together four companies dedicated to movement manufacturing and to watch exterior components.

Chaumont Group comprises the Jura-based companies Efteor, which specializes in watch cases and clasps in precious metals, and Le Composant, dedicated to oscillating weights and bracelets in precious metals for very high-end brands. It also includes two companies from La Chaux-de-Fonds: Télôs Watch, a laboratory devoted to the development of exclusive movements and complications, and Henri Robert, a manufacturer of high-precision cutting tools.

The group intends to bring further specialized watch component manufacturers into its structure. Each member company retains its operational autonomy while working within a shared strategic vision and a common industrial framework designed to combine precision, reliability and industrial capacity. Each entrepreneur becomes a shareholder in the group, ensuring lasting strategic alignment while participating directly in its growth. Founded and led by Marco Piana, Vam has invested more than EUR 600 million in mid-sized companies, including the Everest, Gym Nation Italia, Etjca and Gruppo Florence groups.

Why Neuchâtel for a watch components platform

The choice of Neuchâtel places the group at the heart of a canton whose reputation for precision is inseparable from watchmaking. That heritage remains actively cultivated: the Métiers du Temps | Time Arts initiative, based in Le Locle, unites major watchmaking groups, artisans and researchers around traditional craftsmanship, research and education, and received CHF 1.6 million from the Federal Department of Economic Affairs, Education and Research in recognition of its national strategic importance.

Around that core, the canton has built an industrial base that extends well beyond watch movements. The Haute École Arc runs a Microengineering School in Neuchâtel with close ties to the watchmaking, medtech and precision industries, while CSEM and EPFL operate a Micromanufacturing Science and Engineering Center dedicated to additive manufacturing and micro-fabrication. Microcity, the canton’s innovation hub, is undergoing an expansion that will add 10,000 square meters of laboratories and shared spaces.

The same precision culture supports activities as varied as an ultra-miniaturized atomic clock developed at the University of Neuchâtel for lunar timekeeping, the optical atomic clocks developed by Rolex Quantum with CSEM at the historic Neuchâtel Observatory, and the precision manufacturing of spinal implants and surgical instruments. For a group assembling suppliers of cases, clasps, oscillating weights and cutting tools, that concentration of skills, training and industrial subcontracting sits within a short radius.