Twenty-four people will decide the most important awards in watchmaking this year. One of them is Pranav Saboo.
The Managing Director and CEO of Ethos Limited has been named to the jury of the Grand Prix d'Horlogerie de Genève for its 2026 edition. He is the only Indian on this year's panel, which is a small sentence with a fair amount behind it.
The GPHG is usually described as the Oscars of watchmaking, and for once the shorthand is close to accurate. Established in 2001 and run by the GPHG Foundation in Geneva, it is the one annual award the entire industry takes seriously, from the largest Swiss maisons to independents working out of a single atelier. Twenty prizes will be handed out on 7 November, and at the top sits the Aiguille d'Or Grand Prix, the award every brand actually wants.
What a GPHG juror actually does, and what Pranav Saboo signed up for
Being on this jury is not a ceremonial title, which is the part most coverage skips.
Jurors physically handle every competing watch. They are not judging from photographs or spec sheets or brand presentations. The shortlisted pieces are brought together and examined in person, and the jury then decides the winners by secret ballot conducted under notarial supervision. That last detail is unusual enough to be worth pausing on. In an industry where marketing budgets are enormous and relationships run deep, the GPHG has built a process specifically designed so that neither can reach the result.
The 2026 jury has also been restructured. It has been trimmed from 30 members to 24, with Wei Koh, founder of Revolution and The Rake, presiding. The competition categories changed too. Gender-based categories have been dropped entirely, replaced by two technical classifications, Essential Watch and Complication Watch, alongside a separate category for gem-set watches up to six carats. For a competition that has occasionally been accused of being clubby, this is a meaningful reset, and the people sitting on the jury this year are the ones who will define what the new structure produces.
Wei Koh, founder of Revolution and The Rake, presides over the restructured 2026 jury.
Why Pranav Saboo, and why it is not really a first
Here is where the story gets more interesting than the headline.
Pranav Saboo runs Ethos Limited, India's largest luxury watch retailer, a listed company with a national boutique network and relationships with most of the brands that compete at the GPHG. That commercial position is not incidental, and it is very likely why Pranav Saboo was approached. Retail is where the industry finds out what people actually buy rather than what they claim to admire, and a juror who sees that data daily brings a different lens to a table full of journalists, collectors and watchmakers.
But the framing of Saboo as the first Indian voice at the GPHG is not quite right, and the truth is better. His father, Yashovardhan Saboo, the chairman of Ethos, has served both on the GPHG Academy and on the jury itself for two years. India has had a seat at this table before. What is new is that it now appears to be a continuing one rather than an exception, which is a different and more durable kind of progress.
There is also a distinction worth drawing, because a lot of the coverage has blurred it. This is Indian representation in global horology, not Indian watchmaking on the world stage. India does not yet have a manufacture competing for an Aiguille d'Or. What it has is a market large enough, and a collecting community serious enough, that the institutions of Swiss watchmaking now want Indian judgement in the room. That is the actual milestone.
The GPHG finalists are coming to Mumbai
There is a practical reason for Indian readers to care beyond national pride, and it has dates attached.
The GPHG exhibition tours the year's finalists, meaning the actual shortlisted watches rather than photographs of them, and the 2026 tour includes Mumbai. It runs at the St. Regis Mumbai in Lower Parel from 29 September to 1 October, with Ethos Limited as organising partner.
- Press preview and collectors preview: 28 September, by invitation
- Gala opening and inaugural: 29 September, by invitation
- Exhibition open: 29 September to 1 October
- Guided tours and watchmaking experience: 29 September to 1 October, on registration, timings to be announced
The guided tours are the part worth planning around. Being walked through the finalists by someone who can explain what separates them is a materially better experience than wandering a room of vitrines, and registration means you should sort it in advance rather than turning up.
The timing is neat too. Nominees are announced in early September, so by the time the watches reach Mumbai at the end of the month, you will know exactly what you are looking at and which categories are contested. Until recently, seeing the year's best watchmaking in person meant being in Geneva or catching the tour elsewhere. Now it means a few days in Lower Parel.
The wider shift behind the appointment
The appointment does not read as an isolated piece of news, which is what makes it worth writing about.
Look at the rest of the Indian calendar and the shape of things becomes clear. India Watch Weekend has established itself in Mumbai. Bangalore Watch Days ran earlier this month. Collector evenings now happen with some regularity across Delhi and the other metros, and brands are giving the country better allocations than they did even three years ago.
Two or three years ago the Indian collector's calendar was close to empty and the only serious option was to travel. That has changed quickly, and the appointment of Pranav Saboo is one more marker of the same shift rather than a standalone honour.
What to watch for on 7 November
For Pranav Saboo and his 23 fellow jurors, the work starts soon. The nominees are announced in early September, and the ceremony takes place on 7 November at the Bâtiment des Forces Motrices in Geneva, a date already circled on the autumn watch calendar. Twenty prizes, one Aiguille d'Or.
The restructured categories make this year genuinely unpredictable. Essential Watch and Complication Watch are new classifications with no precedent to guide expectations, and the gem-set category finally separates jewelled watches from jewellery watchmaking, a line the competition has fudged for years. Nobody can point to last year's results and confidently predict this year's.
For Indian readers there is a simple reason to pay attention beyond national interest. The GPHG shortlist is the single best annual education in what is actually happening in watchmaking, because it cuts across price, size and brand recognition. Independents sit alongside conglomerate-owned maisons. A watch from a workshop of four people can beat one backed by a marketing budget in the tens of millions. If you want to understand where the craft is going rather than where the advertising is pointing, the finalist list in September is the document to read.
And this year, when the ballots are counted under notarial supervision in Geneva, one of them will have been cast by someone who runs watch boutiques in Mumbai, Delhi and Chandigarh. For Pranav Saboo, that is not a token detail. It is a reasonable measure of how far the Indian market has come.
Sources: GPHG, Ethos Limited