Swatch Group is seeking $170 million in damages from Samsung Electronics in an ongoing damages hearing at the London High Court, following a 2022 ruling that Samsung had infringed trademarks belonging to Swatch’s portfolio brands – Omega, Tissot, Longines, and the Swatch brand itself – through 26 digital watch face applications available for download on the Galaxy App Store. The watch faces, Swatch argues, offered cheap copies of its premium and mass-market designs on Samsung smartwatch devices. The download count is not enormous: approximately 160,000 times across the United Kingdom and European Union between October 2015 and February 2019, the period the damages claim covers. But the valuation model Swatch applies to that download volume produces a figure of $170 million, and the gap between those two numbers is what Samsung’s lawyers are making their central argument about. The gap between 160,000 downloads and a $170 million demand is what NewsTrackerToday flags as the damages calculation question the London hearing will resolve.
The legal history of this case runs longer than the damages hearing. The London High Court ruled in 2022 that Samsung’s watch face apps infringed Swatch’s trademark rights. Samsung appealed. The Court of Appeal upheld the infringement ruling in late 2023. The liability is settled. What remains open is the appropriate remedy, and the damages hearing represents Swatch’s attempt to convert a confirmed infringement into a financial obligation meaningful enough to function as a deterrent for future intellectual property decisions. Samsung’s lawyers have described the $170 million claim as “exaggerated” and “out of touch with reality.” They argue that Swatch suffered no material loss and that Samsung derived no significant benefit from the watch faces in question. Both arguments point at the same underlying dispute about how you value trademark infringement when the directly attributable commercial harm is difficult to isolate.
Isabella Moretti examines the damages methodology: “Trademark infringement damages in UK courts typically draw from three possible approaches: the claimant’s actual lost profits, the infringer’s actual gained profits, or a notional royalty that the parties would have agreed to had they licensed the use legitimately. At 160,000 downloads, the actual lost profits and the infringer’s gained profits from the watch faces themselves are probably modest. The $170 million figure likely incorporates brand dilution arguments – the claim that the availability of cheap digital copies of Omega and Tissot designs damages those brands’ premium positioning in ways that extend beyond the download revenue directly attributable to Samsung. Brand dilution damages are real in legal theory and difficult to quantify in practice, which is where the gap between the download volume and the claimed damages lives.”
Daniel Wu places the trademark dispute in a broader pattern: “The Swiss watch industry’s response to the smartwatch’s cultural encroachment has been multi-dimensional: partnerships, licensing deals, product innovation, and litigation. Swatch and Samsung were in licensing talks before this litigation began and failed to reach agreement. The High Court route is the alternative to a licensing deal that one party found insufficient. The $170 million demand is partly a damages calculation and partly the opening position in a negotiation that may never settle because Samsung’s legal position is that the appropriate damages are dramatically lower. The outcome of the London hearing sets the licensing floor for any future conversation.” The Samsung counter is what NewsTrackerToday pulls as the commercial context: the company whose lawyers called the claim exaggerated is the same company that builds the devices which display the watch faces, not a minor player with limited resources to mount a defense.
Swatch’s choice to pursue the London market specifically reflects the UK’s distinctive position in luxury brand trademark protection. The High Court and Court of Appeal have both delivered favorable rulings for Swatch in this case, and British courts have a history of robust trademark protection for established brands. The EU component of the claim covers the download territory in which Swatch’s EU trademarks were infringed, but the litigation runs through London given the timing of the original filings before Brexit. The damages calculation will need to apply different legal standards to UK and EU portions of the claim, which adds procedural complexity to what is already a factually contested question about how to value 160,000 downloads of watch face apps.
The most credible projection is that the London court will award Swatch a materially smaller sum than the $170 million demand, consistent with how UK trademark damages cases have historically treated the gap between brand dilution theory and documented commercial harm. If the court awards a notional royalty rather than brand dilution damages, the headline number could be substantially lower. Samsung’s legal position that Swatch suffered no loss and Samsung derived no significant benefit, while unlikely to result in a zero award given the confirmed infringement, may succeed in constraining the damages framework to direct download-revenue attribution rather than premium brand theory. The outcome will inform how digital watch face licensing negotiations between watchmakers and smartwatch manufacturers proceed across the industry, and it is the precedent that News Tracker Today lands on as the reason the $170 million hearing matters beyond this specific dispute.
