Who is the official service center for Seiko watches?

The Great Blue; Kinetic Auto Relay 100M

I have a 15 year old Seiko watch which I love very much. It's a Great Blue series and kinda one-of-its-kind, because Seiko discontinued it as soon as it was launch. So, there are very limited number of units. The watch I own is a Kinetic Auto Relay which means it is powered by my arm movement. And the nice thing about it is that if I don't use my watch, it hands will not move but the Kinetic capacitor which stores energy (up to 4 years of inactivity) will continue to keep track of the time. When I picked up the watch and shake it a bit, it will wake up and auto adjust to the correct time whether it is AM or PM.

But my watch is 15 year old. At that age, the capacitor cannot hold a lot of charges. These days if I left my watch unused for 2 days, the watch stopped keeping time.

I need to get the capacitor replaced. But who is the official service center for Seiko?

The thing about luxury watches is that if you don't send it to their authorized dealer and service center, it will void your warranty. Worse, some unauthorized and shady dealer will replaced your minute hand or hour hand and second hand with cheaper hands because they can resell your hands.

So, I started looking for the service center. If I go to seikowatches.com, it says a company called Thong Sia Sdn Bhd in KL. What? Sounds like a Chinaman company and I don't have a lot of trust for Chinaman company! And how do we know seikowatches.com is legit Seiko website? Ok, I know I am paranoid but hey, why not seiko.com? It's really not easy when the company, Seiko, is not doing things to help secure their brand or advertise it.

I went to this place in Jalan Sultan Ismail. It's a building next to Standard Chartered, down the street from Lot 10. My suggestion is to take a train as the parking is VERY limited and very tight (although parking is cheap at RM4/hour).

When I went in, this was advertise in their reception / customer service area:

Thong Sia is the sole distributor for Seiko since 1963

Ok, so I think I am more asssured that this is a legit place. To be a sole distributor for Seiko watches since 1963 must mean something (and Mido watches too). Anyway, I got my capacitor changed within 30 minutes, paid RM60 for it (didn't expect it to be that cheap - when I changed my wife's Tissot battery, it cost RM60 for a normal coin base battery from Switzerland, where I often wondered if they are trying to pull a fast one on their customer!).

Here's a mural in the reception office:

Nice historical wall mural about how they received their sole distributorship

It says:

But acquiring francise rights as Seiko’s sole agent for South East Asia was not an easy task for Thong Sia.This was during a period when anti-Japanese statements were rampant and Japanese goods were considered inferior to their western counterparts.

In addition to this, Seiko already had a sole agent in Hong Kong. Confident of its intimate knowledge of the market, Thong Sia pledged an annual sales figure of 1.8 million watches for the South East Asian region, from Seiko’s annual production of 5.8 million watches at that time.

Thus in 1963, Thong Sia became Seiko’s sole dealer for South East Asia.

So, there you go. Thong Sia is legit.