Yema

Yema was founded in 1948 in Besançon, the centre of French watchmaking, by Henry Louis Belmont, a graduate of the city's national watchmaking school. Through the 1960s and 1970s it grew into the largest watch producer in France, and its catalogue from those years supplies most of the models the brand is known for: the Superman diver of 1963, with its bezel lock at three o'clock, the Yachtingraf regatta chronograph and the Rallygraf motorsport chronograph, both of 1966. In 1982 Jean-Loup Chrétien wore a Yema Spationaute I aboard the Salyut 7 station, making it the first French watch in space.

Ownership changed repeatedly after the founder: Matra, then the Seiko group's Hattori from 1988 to 2004, then a French investor. Since 2009 the brand has belonged to Montres Ambre, a family company in Morteau, which has rebuilt it around reissues of the Superman, Rallygraf and Spationaute and around its own calibres, the MBP1000 and, since 2022, the micro-rotor CMM.20.