1. Who is Tag? Is it a large company that does many things and has a Tag Heuer watch division or do they sell use of their trademark. I ask because I was looking into air travel a few months ago and found Tag corperate aviation. They used the same "tag" logo that the watch does. I also saw the same logo in an advert. for a fancy radio in the UK. What gives? Michael's reply is in this Reddish Shade... TAG was only a shareholder... TAG is the Techniques d'Avant-Garde, a company which is Arabian owned, as far as I know. They acquired the stock majority during the early 80s. Former owners were Lemania and Piaget. From 1985 the company was renamed to TAG-Heuer. The history of Heuer is long and interesting and a fasicinating counterpoint to Omega's in many ways. For much of their existance Heuer and Omega were chasing the same customers. Heuer merged with Leonidas in 1964 and eventually took them over completely... The firm was still family owned when Jack W. Heuer saw that the only way to secure the future was to write off the capital. The new owners became the Lemania movement manufacturer and associated shareholders, including the Piaget family. The acquisition of a majority stake by the "Techniques d'Avant-Garde" group in 1985 gave the company a new name TAG-Heuer. The major shareholder of TAG was Saudi Arabian until 1996 when the company was floated on the stock-exchange. In mid-September 1999, the french luxury products manufacturer LVMH bought TAG for almost 1,2 billion Swiss Francs. Prior to that TAG became well known as the sponsor for the Porsche -Motor for McLaren in Formula 1. They did win the World Championship once or twice, don't know the years anymore. Absolutely correct. TAG-McLaren's absolutely dominated F1 during the late 1980's I too forget the years, but they were nearly unstopable during those years. 2. What happened to Tag Heuer watches? Before the 1990`s they seemed to have made fine timepieces of horological note and were almost on level with Omega and Breitling. Now they seem to be fashion ware. Actually the cut off date for the "old Heuer" for the most part is probably the late 1980's... There have been some models that persisted beyond that date, the Pilot's models for example. But you are correct in that Omega, Breitling and Heuer all competed for the same customer's monies. Now the company is also owned by luxury holding LMHV which bought it in 1999 for more than a billion Swiss Franks. As far as I heard it is planned to upgrade the line of their products. I hope they will change the name one day - to Heuer again. But having said that, I suppose I would rather have a healthy profitable TAG-Heuer than a defunct out of business Heuer... It's the lesser of two evils. I too hope that TAG-Heuer finds a way to not only do the "d'Avant-Garde" innovative case/bracelet/design work, while expanding their classic's line to incorporate some really good solid value priced chronographs that would be a alternative to the SeMPC... Perhaps a good idea would be to keep TAG-Heuer for the existing lines and revert to "Heuer" for the classic line.
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