Samsung must pay Swatch Group US$11.6 million over ‘knock-off’ smartwatch faces

Samsung has been ordered to pay Swatch Group US$11.6 million (S$14.74 million) after a judge found that hosting digital clones of luxury timepieces on its smartwatch app store was “very damaging” to the Swiss watchmaker.The High Court in London on Wednesday awarded damages for trademark infringement after finding the apps mimicked designs of Swatch Group brands including Breguet, Blancpain, Omega, Longines and Tissot.The figure is far less than the US$170 million Swatch had demanded, though Samsung had insisted that the Swiss company had suffered no damage at all and only a trivial sum of US$300 was owed. The legal battle was fought over 26 digital ‘watch face’ apps, such as the Tissot face on a Samsung smartwatch shown in a court filing. The majority of the US$11.6 million award was for the harm to Swatch’s interests that the judge said was caused by Samsung displaying the watchmaker’s brand names on the Galaxy app store, irrespective of whether consumers actually downloaded the apps. These were developed by third parties rather than by the South Korean tech company.Mr Justice Smith compared this to copycat products being placed on shelves in a physical supermarket and awarded US$10 million for Samsung’s “store display infringements”.“The use of the Swatch Group brands on Samsung’s supermarket shelves (to use the physical analogy), downloadable for nothing or for little money, is to my mind very damaging to the Swatch Group’s property interests,” the judge ruled.“The low price is demeaning of the brands the Swatch Group seek to promulgate.”The High Court in 2022 found Samsung liable for trademark infringement between October 2015 and February 2019 and the company lost a subsequent appeal. A damages inquiry was held this year to quantify the sum owed.While the apps were created by third-party developers, Samsung was held to be liable in part because it controlled the app review process and also marketed its smartwatches with attractive faces.Swatch told the court that the apps, downloaded in the UK and EU about 160,000 times, were “knock-offs” of its exclusive watch dials and amounted to a “large-scale appropriation” of “valuable and carefully protected” trademarks.Lawyers for Samsung said Swatch’s demand was “extravagant” and bore “no relationship to the damage suffered”. It said Samsung “did not want” the software on its Galaxy app store and that it was taken down “as soon as the issue was raised”.Samsung said in a statement on Wednesday: “We are carefully considering the High Court’s judgment and will consider all possible countermeasures, including an appeal.”Swatch said in a statement that Samsung “repeatedly attempted to downplay the scale and significance of the infringements by trivialising the compensation owed to the Swatch Group’s well-known brands”.Swatch noted that proceedings against Samsung have also been brought in the US, which have been stayed pending the outcome of the case in England.Alistair Gray © 2026 The Financial Times.This article originally appeared in The Financial Times.