"Rolex hopes that Tiger, with his Thai mother, will be demographic catnip for the golf-obsessed Asian market."

Slate's Seth Stevenson tries to better understand why Rolex would sign Tiger Woods and ends up profiling the company, revealing many interesting and surprising things about this $5 billion company.

Privately held since its formation in 1905, Rolex is a notoriously tight-lipped company. It doesn't release revenue figures, or explain leadership transitions. (It had a total of three CEOs from 1905 until 2008, when then-CEO Patrick Heiniger resigned under mysterious circumstances.) Even the corporate structure is a bit murky. Rolex founder Hans Wilsdorf died childless in 1960, leaving control of his company to a charitable foundation he'd established. The Hans Wilsdorf Foundation runs Rolex to this day. When I emailed a polite-but-elliptical media-relations woman to ask whether Rolex is essentially a nonprofit, and who the foundation’s major beneficiaries are, she responded with this sentence: "The principal focus of the foundation is to support a variety of philanthropic endeavors."

And regarding the Tiger signing, Stevenson concludes it all comes down to the Asian markets.

Instead, he argues, this move is in large part about Asia. That’s where the growth in luxury watches will come from in the future. Right now, Rolex’s nemesis Omega dominates China—Omega is the other “mass class,” entry-level luxury timepiece—simply because it’s better-established there. Rolex hopes that Tiger, with his Thai mother, will be demographic catnip for the golf-obsessed Asian market.