Why Did HMT Watches Fail?
The People's Watchmaker — 50 Years of Monopoly, Then Obsolete
📜 What Happened
HMT (Hindustan Machine Tools) was once the watchmaker of India: from 1961, its watches were a national institution — the wedding gift, the retirement gift, the symbol of Indian self-reliance. For decades it had a near-monopoly, with waiting lists for its most popular models. Then the world changed: quartz watches arrived from Japan, electronic watches from everywhere, and eventually mobile phones that made watches optional. HMT's response was decades of denial — it kept making mechanical watches, kept its bloated workforce, and kept refusing to accept that its monopoly was gone. Losses mounted year after year; governments propped it up through political cycles. Finally in 2016, after losing ₹20 crore a year, the government shut the watch division down. The brand that defined Indian time became a museum piece.
☠️ The Fatal Mistake
Treating a monopoly as a permanent right — the waiting lists and the brand loyalty fooled management into believing the market would always wait for them.
🧠 The Lesson (Free for You)
Monopolies are weather, not geography: they change. HMT's lesson is that 'national institution' is not a business model — when the technology shifts, the institution that refuses to shift becomes the museum. The only durable moat is the willingness to make yourself obsolete before the market does.
📕 The Antidote Book
Christensen's Harvard research began with a paradox: why do well-run market leaders — companies that listen to customers, invest in R&D, and chase profits rationally — get destroyed by scrappy newcomers with WORSE…
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