Jean-Claude Biver
Chairman
Hublot
Born: September 20, 1949
Born in Luxembourg, his family moved to Switzerland when he was ten years old. He attended the Collège de Morges, obtained his maturité at the Lausanne Business School and completed his studies at the University of Lausanne. He seized the unique opportunity of a year's "all-rounder" training offered to him by Audemars Piguet in 1975. In 1980, he left Audemars Piguet to join Omega as gold products manager. In 1982, he and his friend Jacques Piguet bought the Blancpain name which had been dormant since 1961. Using the slogan "Since 1735 there has never been a quartz Blancpain, and there never will be", he quickly revived the company and increased the turnover to 50 million Swiss francs.
In 1992 he decided to sell Blancpain to the SMH Group (later to become the Swatch Group) and joined Nicolas G. Hayek’s management team. As a member of the Swatch Group's Management Committee, he was given the task of developing the marketing and products for the Omega brand, a company he had left ten years earlier. At the end of 2003, he decided to take a year's sabbatical but he quickly changed his mind in order to take over the leadership of a small business founded in 1980: Hublot Geneva. In 2004, as CEO he decided to focus on Hublot's original product and develop a new concept for the brand: "The Art of Fusion". In fact, in 1980, Hublot was the first watchmaker to create a watch which fused different materials, by combining gold and rubber. The company owes its impressive growth to the boundless energy of its unique owner: the company's economic growth, with turnover increasing in 4 years from 25 million to more than 200 million Swiss francs in 2008, when the brand was sold to LVMH.
Hublot remains committed to traditional expertise, creating timepieces which bear the mark of the most talented master watchmakers. In this way, the brand represents the Art of Fusion between watchmaking culture and cutting-edge technical developments, between the past and the future... as, in the words of Jean-Claude Biver, "we are not breaking with the past, on the contrary we are paying homage to it by connecting it to the future".
