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The Hour Glass Limited
The Hour Glass sells luxury watches and jewelry through a network of stores across Asia and Australia.
The Hour Glass is a luxury watch retailer. It runs stores that sell high-end timepieces from famous Swiss brands, along with jewelry and other luxury goods, to wealthy customers across Southeast Asia, Australia, and Northeast Asia. If you want to buy a Rolex, a Patek Philippe, or an Audemars Piguet in Singapore or several other Asian cities, The Hour Glass is one of the places you go.
The business makes money by buying watches from the brands and selling them at a markup in its own boutiques. It also earns from after-sales service and from selling pre-owned watches. The brands themselves are the draw — The Hour Glass doesn't make watches, it curates and sells them, and customers choose it because it carries the hard-to-get names and offers a trusted, well-presented shopping experience. The watch world has a peculiar economics. The hottest models are allocated by the brands, not simply ordered, so a retailer's clout with the manufacturers matters enormously. The Hour Glass has built deep, decades-long relationships with the big Swiss houses, which helps it get stock of the watches everyone wants. It also operates its own multi-brand stores and some mono-brand boutiques.
Founded in Singapore in 1979 by the Tay family, the company grew from a single store into one of the region's largest luxury watch groups, and it remains family-run and listed on the Singapore Exchange. Its fortunes rise and fall with the appetite for luxury watches in Asia, which has been strong but can cool quickly when economies slow.
Saved answer · last researched 14 Nov 2026