Corum spent 12 years under Citychamp — its own sales director bought it back

Corum was founded in La Chaux-de-Fonds in 1955 and built its name on the unconventional: the Golden Bridge with its baguette movement, the Admiral with its nautical flags, the Coin watch struck from a real gold coin. In 2013 the house was bought by China Haidian Holdings, later renamed Citychamp Watch Group. The years that followed were, in the understatement of the trade press, a struggle.

On 30 April 2025 the ownership era ended not with a sale to another group but with a buyout from inside: Haso Mehmedovic, Corum's international sales director — a watchmaker by training, at the company since 2011 — led a management buyout backed by a group of Swiss investors from the luxury and finance sectors. The brand returned to Swiss ownership, and Mehmedovic became chief executive.

The reset was a shrinking. The distribution network fell from more than 300 points of sale in 2024 to 70; the catalogue was narrowed around the Admiral, the Golden Bridge and a new Heritage line; the plan commits to a gradual return to fully in-house manufacturing, and designer Emmanuel Gueit was installed to rebuild the visual identity. At Watches & Wonders 2026 the relaunched house showed 19 new models, including a completely replaced Admiral collection with a new calibre developed with Concepto.

The shape of the case: the brand survived, the model did not. A distribution footprint four times what the brand could fill, diluted identity and lost manufacturing autonomy were the inheritance of the Citychamp years — and the buyout's answer was to become a much smaller Swiss watchmaker.