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| Poljot International Watches |
There is hardly a private watch collection in Europe that does not include at least a Buran chronograph or a Poljot alarm watch. Following the political upheaval in Eastern Europe, huge numbers of somewhat exotic-looking watches appeared on the black market, and few could resist the temptation to buy a robust mechanical watch with a Swiss family tree for comparatively little outlay.
The great appeal of watches produced by the First Moscow Watch Factory to collectors is the fact that various Swiss mechanical movements were able to survive in exile in Russia following the quartz boom of the 1970s. In addition to alarm movements by A. Schild SA, the Poljot watchmakers also acquired complete production facilities from the Swiss in the mid seventies, including design blueprints for Venus Caliber 188, the successor of which, following the merger, was manufactured under the name of Valjoux Caliber 7734. In the meantime the original automatic Caliber 2416 designed by the Second Moscow Watch Factory has gotten some stiff competition from Switzerland: Since 1998 the company has been purchasing large quantities of the ETA Caliber 2671.
The First Moscow Watch Factory is at the forefront of the many privatized Russian companies now entering the global business community and the free-market economy. It is not difficult to imagine the powers of persuasion needed to convince factory workers used to seeing millions of
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simple watches designed to meet their basic needs to suddenly accept western quality standards for luxury goods. With the foundation of Poljot Uhrenvertrieb GmbH in Germany, the partially privatized watch
factory, in which the city of Moscow also has a share, has created a first export outlet. In Germany's Alzenau, five watchmakers monitor the quality of the movements and cases supplied
from Russia. Following a visual inspection and a rate test, each individual watch is provided with an international guarantee certificate as well as a
hand-written rate certificate complete with serial number and the signature of the watchmaker who carried out the test. "Good quality at a fair price," says Alexander Schorochov, managing director of the German Poljot Uhrenvertrieb GmbH, "is the only way of surviving long-term in the international marketplace."
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Poljot International
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