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Comment by phamilton | Hacker News Reader

> max capacity

As determined by what? Probably the current manufacturing facilities that they have strategically chosen not to expand.

You can't just expand willy-nilly. It takes tons of investment, money, and you need to find a labor force. And what happens if demand softens (like it's doing at this very moment)? Then you're stuck with a bunch of extra capacity doing nothing.

Digging a bit, it seems the wait-list really started to be a thing in 2019.

> It takes a ton of investment.

I'm not an expert, but for an "assembled by hand" luxury product it seems like incremental capacity is much lower risk. They don't need to stand up a factory. Couldn't they hire and train 10% more technicians for assembly? And when demand softens, scale back?

I suspect you’re underestimating what it takes to train a technician for his kind of work. I imagine that could easily be a multi-year process (10 years even), and require a lot of attention from your highly skilled and already in-demand master practitioners.

An element of the decision may also be around quality control. Especially if a lot of the work is highly skilled but still manual human labour.

They are expending manufacturing as much as they can. The constraint is really the workforce.

Glad they are not the main producer of high tech chips then (AKA TSMC)...

If mechanical watches had nearly the order of magnitude of demand that ICs do, then maybe they’d be faster at it.

That doesn't make any sense... The only reasons why you would think they are not restricting supply would be if demand varies randomly widely or if the people planning production and/or purchasing are incompetent.

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