$11.6 million for a watch face

On 26 August 2026 the High Court in London put a price on a name. In a judgment running to some fifty pages, Mr Justice Marcus Smith ordered Samsung to pay the Swatch Group 11,600,000 dollars over watch faces for smartwatches. Not watches, faces, and in fact images of faces offered for download on an app store between 2015 and 2019. In the whole affair not one timepiece was made, worn or sold. What was weighed, disputed and costed was the value of a drawing and a signature.

The facts had been settled long ago. Independent developers had put on sale, on the app store serving Samsung’s watches, faces carrying the marks of Omega, Longines, Tissot, Breguet, Blancpain and other houses in the group. Trade mark infringement, the use of a protected sign without authorisation, was found against Samsung by the High Court in 2022 and upheld on appeal at the end of 2023. What remained was to put a figure on the wrong. That is the object of a separate phase in English law, the inquiry as to damages, where the court assesses the harm once liability is established.

Two valuations met head on, at opposite ends of the scale. The Swatch Group’s expert, Mr Forbes, started from what a licence would have cost, a trade mark licence being the contract by which an owner lets a third party exploit its name for payment. He arrived at 170 million, in dollars. Samsung’s expert, Mr Bezant, reasoned the other way round: the faces went out free or for a few pence, the rare paid downloads had brought in 1,002.77 dollars in all, Samsung had taken almost none of that, and the Swatch Group had not lost a sale. Compensation due, on his figures, 301 dollars. The judge dismissed both and sent the experts back to back.

Harm without loss

The court reasoned in negotiating damages, a method under which the award matches the price the permission would have cost, even where the owner proves no loss and the infringer has gained next to nothing. The Swatch Group never licenses its marks to anyone, the judge noted, and that refusal to license is precisely what was turned into money.

Of the 11.6 million awarded, 10 rest on a single head of damage, the mere presence of the marks in the app store, which the judgment describes as the most serious threat to them. The remaining 1.6 million answers to the downloads, around 160,000 of them, charged at 10 dollars each in the court’s reasoning.

The use of the Swatch Group brands on Samsung’s supermarket shelves […], downloadable for nothing or for little money, is to my mind very damaging to the Swatch Group’s property interests. The low price is demeaning of the brands the Swatch Group seek to promulgate.

Mr Justice Marcus Smith, Montres Breguet SA v Samsung Electronics, [2026] EWHC 2228 (Ch), 26 August 2026

What the court costed, then, is not a missed sale. It is the harm done to the price level and the scarcity a name carries with it, and that free distribution wears away. Lawyers call this dilution, the slow erosion of what a mark calls to mind as it becomes commonplace. The judge spoke of a death by a thousand cuts.

Has the face gone virtual?

In 2025 the Swiss watch industry exported 14.6 million watches, down 4.8 per cent on the year according to the Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry. Over the period of the infringement alone, Samsung shifted a little over 3 million of its own smartwatches. That balance of volume is not what the case was about. What it was about is what the smartwatch has done to the dial, turning it into a visual element that updates itself, is picked off the shelves of an app store and becomes, by that very move, a part swapped at will.

The centre of gravity of a watch house shifted long ago from the calibre to the name and the imagination around it. That immaterial layer has a property the mechanism does not: it can be copied and carried over onto screens watchmakers do not build. A mainplate, an escapement, a hairspring stay in the workshop. A logo and an arrangement of numerals travel in seconds through a virtual world.

Ground the platforms hold

The most telling precedent sits in the judgment itself. In 2012 the Swiss Federal Railways took Apple to task for using, without agreement, the design of their station clock as a default display on the iPhone. The matter was settled out of court in October 2012. Apple is understood to have paid a lump sum that the judgment puts, at current rates, a little under 25 million, in dollars. A Swiss institution, a clock face, a technology giant paying for having used it. Does history not come round again?

When a watchmaker wants to exist on a smartwatch, it goes through a channel others control, no longer only for its production or its distribution, but for its image and the force of its identity themselves. The model cited at trial is the agreement between Apple and Hermès, a watch presented as designed by Apple in California and by Hermès in Paris. Apple and Google work every day, across tens of millions of devices, the very spring watchmakers sell piece by piece, the desire attached to how a watch looks. In setting the royalty at 10 dollars a download, the judge wrote that he meant to encourage app store operators, Apple and Google by name, to respect other people’s property.

What this reveals

The Swatch Group won, and it was right to fight. What it takes home is another matter. Seven years of proceedings, two teams of financial experts, a trial in London, for a sum weighing less than a day’s sales at a group that took 6.3 billion francs in 2025, and a payment Samsung has said it is minded to challenge on appeal. As a financial operation, it does not add up.

Which is to say it was not a financial operation. A group that owns Breguet and Blancpain, two houses founded before the French Revolution, and that keeps alive crafts almost nobody can practise any more, spent seven years in court defending a drawing and a signature. It did not treat that part as an accessory to its craft. It treated it as what holds the craft up. A movement is demonstrated, a name is believed, and a belief once dented is not repaired at the bench.

The hierarchy the trade recites, calibre first and the rest after, turns over as soon as you look at what is actually exposed. A mainplate is protected by how hard it is to make: nobody copies an escapement in seconds. A dial is protected by nothing but the law, and it now travels on screens whose rules are written elsewhere, by players moving faster than those rules, and the judge took care to name them, Apple and Google. The dial is not the surface of the watch. It is the part by which all the rest is recognised, the only one its maker cannot protect on its own, and it is what the houses fight tooth and nail for.

Sources: judgment in Montres Breguet SA & Ors v Samsung Electronics Co Ltd & Anor [2026] EWHC 2228 (Ch), High Court of Justice, Business and Property Courts, 26 August 2026
liability judgment [2022] EWHC 1127 (Ch), 20 May 2022, and appeal judgment [2023] EWCA Civ 1478, 15 December 2023, published on caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk
Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry, 2025 export statistics, statement of 29 January 2026, fhs.swiss
Samsung Electronics, statement on considering an appeal
Swatch Group, 2025 full-year results, net sales of 6,280 million francs, statement of 29 January 2026.