Weekend of Watch Sales Brings in $108m
May 29, 23
(IDEX Online) - The big three auction houses - Phillips, Sotheby's, and Christie's - sold watches for a combined total of $108m in a single weekend, dispelling concerns of a slowdown in the pre-owned market.
Phillips sold all lots offered at its Geneva Watch Auction XVII, in association with Bacs & Russo, bringing in over $52m, with two watches selling for over $3m each.
Christie's sold 10 watches for over $500,000 each and brought in over $45m from its Rare Watches and Art of F.P. Journe (master watchmaker) sales, also in Geneva.
And Sotheby's Geneva brought in $13m from two sales, Important Watches and Centuries of Time: A Private Collection of decorative pocket watches.
The priciest timepiece of all three sales was a 1988 yellow gold Rolex Cosmograph Daytona ref 6720 (pictured) with a pave diamond dial, sapphire indexes, and baguette diamond bezel. It sold for $4,105,853, way above Phillips' pre-sale estimate of $1,340,000 to $2,680,000.