When you are excluding electronic & kybernetik timekeeping-technologies and focus on mechanical ways, that reached their performance-peak approx 60y ago (*klikk), then the closest association, that comes up when you see the prices of the shares of Seiko, Citizen and Casio outperform (in that order) Richemonts stock price, is a mechanical tool, a lathe: see the article of Kingflum and ScrewDownCrown (*klikk).
But there is more than the obvious mechanics: The market is not pricing the todays or yesterdays earnings -- it never does --, but the sum of the discounted future returns. This is true for any asset-price. And this future is -- even though unknown -- probably brighter for companies with a set of future-, obsolescence- & counterfeit-proof technologies (Unique Selling Points), than for companies that don't have such.
The three brands from Japan are open to and innovative in other technologies than mechanical watch-movements -- although some of them are also very good in this very-Swiss category of watchmaking. These future-proof innovations are High Accuracy Quartz, GPS- & Radio-Control, Solar & Spring Drive -- and these are just the known innovations, that are currently marketed. Different than mechanical watches, all of them appear to be future-proof -- meaning they are not yet at the end of their effectivity- and efficiency-development; far from obsolescence; hard or even impossible to counterfeit and true USPs. Future improvements that lure buyers into non-saturated markets are very likely: a more efficient SpringDrive and a more accurate HAQ is an obvious buying argument.
It are these innovations that could command premium prices with above-average margins -- today and in future. And because it fits perfect here, I want to pull up this article of mine from March again -- the question remains: What is the Swiss answer to this? *klikk. I suggest to read that.
The graph was made by google and shows the four watchmakers stocks for the last 24 months. In the last 12 months the difference was even more significant.
Addendum 2026-08-26: My suggestion here is to use close and eventually one-dimensional explanations for this outperformance: the market realizes and prices that all three Japanese brands populate an area of the market that is avoided by many Swiss companies (premiumising) but is more lively than one thinks and even more important the market prices-in that esp Citizen & Seiko sit on innovations that have the power to become large & booming markets by their own and all without Swiss competition -- quartz, tuningfork & especially SpringDrive.
What we see here is what I expected for a while: the devaluation of the brand (as a legally protected USP) as a mere symbol / sign of quality and unique selling point -- often questionable today -- and, in its place, the elevation of actual, factual unique selling points (innovations, designs, finishing etc) and quality.
Also, schaumer ma, dann sehmer scho.