The Swatch heir's time has come

CIGAR-SMOKING former film director and playtime helicopter pilot Nick Hayek is poised to take over the controls at Swatch, the world's biggest watchmaker.

Blessed with the youthful countenance bestowed by prosperity and a villa in Antibes, Hayek, 48, has none of the business-school background conventional among chief executives of corporations with annual sales of Swfr4.2bn(£1.8bn).

So cynics might be tempted to suggest that he is only getting the job because his father Nicholas, now 74, created the group and remains its biggest shareholder.

Has the genius who reinvented the Swiss watch industry and breathed new life into brands from Blancpain and Breguet to Tissot and Omega really allowed affection to cloud his judgment in his dotage?

Hayek junior insists that five years at the Paris Film Academy and his experience of film production, including Family Express with Peter Fonda, provide remarkably good experience for a corporate mogul.

'At first sight, the film industry seems a long way from watchmaking,' he said. But 'to make a film, you need to have an idea, develop a scenario, cast the actors and persuade them to film together, find the money, complete the film and distribute it. To make watches, you need ideas as well. We launch more than 250 new Swatches every year'.

Well, you can understand the point. Managing a regular business with 20,000 employees might seem child's play compared with the cinema's eternal problems of fragile egos and flaky ideas, shaky finance and peripatetic locations. And he has spent the past seven years in the family firm, learning the trade.

But the more one learns about Swatch and its creator, the more apt the choice seems. Born in Beirut of an American father and a Lebanese mother, Hayek senior studied mathematics and settled in Switzerland because his wife Marianne lived there.

After briefly standing in for her dad at his 20-man foundry, Nicholas set up his own engineering consultancy, and through sheer flair and imagination satisfied clients from Mercedes to the Swiss government.

In the early 1980s he backed his rescue plan for Switzerland's two biggest watch firms, brought to their knees by Japanese competition, with borrowed cash. His remedy was utterly original: he went for the budget market with a newly-invented brand, turning the watch into an affordable fashion accessory.

He then revived Omega, Tissot and Longines, bought up and relaunched luxury marques such as Breguet and Blancpain and even found time to invent the Smart micro-car. In a company driven by an unusual mixture of commitment to employees, creativity and humour, the pirate's flag and sweet machine that adorn Hayek junior's apparently chaotic office seem to suggest he shares the qualities and values essential to Swatch's success.

Since joining the group in 1994, he has piloted its expansion into wrist-worn telephones, internet-connected watches and watch retailing. He has also negotiated a long-term collaboration with AOL Time Warner that is expected to produce all sorts of wrist gadgets and 'entertainment' devices.

Hayek's job, it seems, is multi-layered. He must continue building the traditional watch business, which accounts for a quarter of world production and faces toughening competition from luxury groups LVMH, Gucci, Richemont and Rolex. He must extend its new chain of showcase Tourbillon watch stores worldwide. And he must create trendy mass-market gadgets combining internet and mobile telephony.

He must satisfy his stock market investors and family members, including his sister Nayla, a fellow board member, and livewire nephew Marc, who prepared for running Blancpain at the age of 30 by opening a restaurant and becoming a cycling champion.

The transfer of power from Hayek senior, who remains group chairman, is gradual. It is set to accelerate next year though dad insists he will step in again if progress stumbles.

For all his casual clothes and boyish air, as chief executive and dauphin, Hayek junior is under pressure to perform. His hours at the company's offices in the heart of Switzerland's watchmaking centre of Bienne are long. They seem to co-exist with his commitment to family and his appetite for the good things in life. But will he still have time to take his mother shopping for Italian truffles by helicopter in 2003?