Fiyta is the biggest watch brand in China, and if you live anywhere else, you have probably never heard of it. Founded in 1987 in Shenzhen, Fiyta is the only publicly listed watch company in China, owned by the state aviation giant AVIC, and the official timepiece of China’s manned space program since 2003. Its watches went to orbit before most Western collectors knew the name existed. That gap, enormous at home and invisible abroad, is basically the whole story of the company.
A startup in the special economic zone
Fiyta began in 1987 as the Shenzhen Feida Watch Company, born in a city that was still inventing itself. Shenzhen was China’s first special economic zone, the place where the planned economy was being traded in for market chaos, and the brand name itself was a mission statement: 飞亚达, roughly “fly out of Asia, reach the world.” They meant it literally enough to put it in the name.
A Fiyta fashion classic ladies’ watch. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
The company made money from the start, and it understood marketing faster than anyone else in the domestic industry. In 1988, while most Chinese factories were still selling through state distribution channels, Fiyta sent “Miss Fiyta” promoters into Beijing’s Xidan department store. A small counter sold 156 watches on the spot, and the brand finished its first year with a profit of 1.2 million yuan. In 1992 it ran an ad before the CCTV evening news, the most expensive and watched slot in the country. Subtle, it was not.
Fiyta also pioneered the business model that defines Shenzhen watchmaking to this day. Instead of doing everything in-house like the old state watch factories in Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, and Liaoning, Fiyta worked the way Hong Kong-influenced Shenzhen firms did: brand owners, parts manufacturers, and assemblers as independent companies in a loose, dynamic relationship. It was faster, cheaper, and more flexible. It also meant the brand’s watches were built on bought-in parts and, mostly, bought-in movements, a fact that would follow the company for decades.
Going to space
Then came the thing that actually made Fiyta famous, in China at least. In 2001, the national space department ran a blind test to pick a watch for the manned spaceflight program, and Fiyta won it. By 2003 the company had developed the first watch made for Chinese astronauts, and on October 15, 2003, Yang Liwei wore a Fiyta quartz chronograph on Shenzhou V, China’s first crewed mission, for 21 hours in orbit.
A Shenzhou launch. Fiyta has supplied the Chinese manned space program since 2003. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Let’s be straight about what that first watch was: a quartz chronograph running an imported Miyota movement. There is no shame in that, practically every non-Swiss watch company on Earth used Japanese quartz in 2003, but it is worth saying because the space heritage marketing has a habit of skipping the detail. What came next was more serious. For the 2008 Shenzhou VII mission, which featured Zhai Zhigang’s first Chinese spacewalk, Fiyta built a mechanical EVA watch, the Spacemaster: a huge mechanical chronograph based on a heavily modified Shanghai 3L movement, engineered for minus 80 degrees Celsius and strong magnetic fields. One of the watchmakers who spent two decades on the space program, Liu Zhonghua, joined Fiyta as a teenage apprentice in 1990 and was still on the team in 2023, when he won a National May Day Labor Medal. The EVA watch won China’s industrial design awards and a Red Dot. This part of the story is real engineering, not just a badge deal.
A quartz empire with mechanical ambitions
While the space program gave Fiyta prestige, the money came from volume: quartz watches with imported movements sold through a huge domestic retail network, including its own Harmony World Watches Center chain. Fiyta experimented early with case materials, tungsten, ceramics, sapphire crystals, a hard-alloy “never-wear” case, a wave-form case design, and sponsored the Chinese gymnastics team at the 2000 Olympics. But the core product was straightforward: affordable, decent-looking quartz watches sold everywhere in China.
Around 2008, the company started pushing upmarket with mechanical lines: the Photographer and Heart of City series, the Gold Buddha, a 60th National Anniversary tourbillon, and the Square Tourbillon. Here is where honesty matters. The Square Tourbillon is described as having a “Fiyta tourbillon movement,” but it is unlikely the company had the resources to develop such a device in-house. The in-house reality, as the trade press put it, was that Fiyta “contented itself with foreign calibres” for most of its history. The ambition is genuine, the independence is aspirational, and those are different things.
Owners and acquisitions
The Fiyta Timepiece Building in Shenzhen. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Fiyta has always been state-adjacent. Its controlling shareholder is AVIC International, part of the Aviation Industry Corporation of China, the giant behind Chinese military aircraft. The ultimate controller is the Chinese state. It is listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, and in 2020 the company renamed itself FIYTA Precision Technology Co., Ltd., which tells you where it wants its identity to sit: precision industry, not fashion brand.
The acquisitions tell the same story. Fiyta bought the Geneva brand Montres Chouriet (sold in China as Emile Chouriet) around 2011, giving it a Swiss nameplate. Then, in October 2016, it took over the Beijing Watch Factory, the venerable manufacture founded in 1958 that actually makes high-end Chinese movements and grand complications in-house. That was the serious move: instead of claiming movement independence, it bought it. Since 2010 the brand has also exhibited in Hall 1 at Baselworld, the prestige wing, which was a statement of intent aimed squarely at the Swiss.
Where it stands now
Today Fiyta remains China’s largest domestic watch brand by sales, with a retail empire across the country and a recent Mars Mission collection that keeps the space theme alive. It still has resale outlets in Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Canada, Vietnam, the US, and Spain, but outside China it is essentially unknown. Nobody in a Western watch forum is arguing about Fiyta’s new release. The brand’s identity is national champion first and design identity second, and a lot of its domestic output is, frankly, derivative. If you want the blunt version: it is a marketing machine with real space-program credentials and real movement capability bought through Beijing Watch, still working out whether it wants to be a watchmaker or a national brand that happens to sell watches.
Why it matters
Every watch nerd knows the Omega Speedmaster went to the Moon. Almost nobody outside China knows Fiyta watches went to space too, and kept going there, for every Chinese crewed mission since 2003. That asymmetry is what makes the brand interesting. Fiyta is what the Chinese watch industry actually looks like: enormous domestic scale, real technical achievement in specific areas like the EVA watch, built on a foundation of quartz and imported movements, with the high-end capability acquired rather than homegrown. It deserves to be in the space-watch conversation on the merits, and it deserves honest scrutiny about everything else. The Spacemaster, the reissue line built on the EVA watch heritage, is probably the most legitimate “space watch you can actually buy” that almost nobody has heard of.
Official site: fiyta.com
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