Sistem51

Unveiled at Baselworld in 2013, thirty years after the debut of the Originals, the Sistem51 was born with a clear ambition: to prove that an automatic mechanical movement too — no longer just a simple quartz calibre — could be produced with almost no human intervention while keeping an accessible price. At the time, the specialist press described it as the first mechanical movement in history designed from the outset for fully automated assembly.

Its construction is radical: the entire calibre is held together by a single central screw, instead of the dozens of screws and bridges in a traditional automatic movement, and the total number of components drops to 51 — not by chance, the same figure as the first Swatch movement of 1983. Assembly is carried out by robots at ETA's Boncourt plant, without a human hand touching the individual parts, and the barrel and automatic rotor provide a power reserve of around 90 hours.

The Sistem51 thus became the heart of an entire family of Swatch automatic watches with transparent casebacks and bright colours, sold for a few hundred euros — a rarity for a Swiss mechanical movement. Its importance grew further ten years later, when the same calibre was chosen as the basis for the 2023 Blancpain x Swatch Scuba Fifty Fathoms collaboration, bringing an innovation created for the group's most affordable segment into a project tied to a haute horlogerie maison.