Yema

YEMA is the great survivor of French watchmaking — founded in Besançon in 1948 by Henry-Louis Belmont, top graduate of the National Watchmaking School, who built the brand by the 1960s into France's largest watch exporter, selling some 400,000 tool watches a year to divers, racers, soldiers, and explorers. Its heritage runs remarkably deep: Mario Andretti wore a YEMA Rallye to victory at the 1969 Indianapolis 500; in 1982 astronaut Jean-Loup Chrétien wore the Spationaute I into orbit from Baikonur, the first French watch in space, followed by Patrick Baudry's Spationaute II aboard the Discovery shuttle in 1985 and Chrétien's Spationaute III to the Mir space station in 1988 — a lineage YEMA still honors today, from the 2017 Spacegraf to the ambassadors celebrated in its ongoing #TimeOfHeroes program. The brand's ownership has been a saga of its own: sold to industrial group Matra in 1982 (whose watch division was, remarkably, run for a time by a young Richard Mille), absorbed into the Seiko Group in 1987, bought back into French hands by its own CEO in 2004, and since 2009 owned by Ambre Group, a family-owned French watchmaking group now run by its third generation, the Böle family — Christopher Böle as YEMA's managing director and Pascal Böle as Ambre Group's CEO.

That 2009 change of ownership set YEMA on its current course: a sustained, expensive campaign to reclaim genuine manufacture status. Beginning with the MBP1000 — developed over four years and €3 million, YEMA's first true in-house caliber — and its successor the YEMA2000, the effort accelerated sharply from 2022 with a new generation bearing the Calibre Manufacture Morteau (CMM) name, designed and developed in-house and machined on YEMA's own CNC centers in Morteau, a UNESCO-recognized watchmaking heritage town in the Jura. The CMM.10 (automatic, 208 components, 27 jewels, 70-hour reserve, Glucydur balance, Incabloc shock protection) and CMM.20 (a slimmer micro-rotor automatic) power the bulk of the modern catalogue; regulating organs come from Swiss partners within 72km of Morteau, but the mainplates and bridges are cut from raw metal in YEMA's own workshops — real T0–T4 manufacture, not assembly of bought-in parts.

The most striking proof of that ambition is the CMM.30: an entirely in-house tourbillon caliber, designed by Olivier Mory, with a free-sprung balance, a LiGA-manufactured escapement, 105 hours of power reserve from a single oversized barrel, shock resistance to 5,000 G, and magnetic resistance to 2,000 Gauss — specifications that would be remarkable at any price, let alone from a brand whose entry watches start under $500. Its showcase is the Superman Titanium Tourbillon CMM.31 Limited Edition ($13,000), housing the tourbillon in YEMA's flagship dive case — arguably the single most compelling argument that this is a manufacture, not a mass-market label wearing a manufacture's clothes. Around that flagship sits one of the broadest collection architectures of any brand in this catalogue: the Superman diving line; the Wristmaster field and Urban Traveller lines for military and urban-sport wear; the Rallygraf and Yachtingraf for motorsport and sailing; the Flygraf and historic Spationaute references for aviation and space heritage; the Navygraf, including dedicated Marine Nationale Femme women's references; and the dressier Granvelle. Across roughly seventy references and an estimated 30,000 watches a year, YEMA remains, in its own words and increasingly in its own metal, an independent French watchmaker.