Watch sales eclipse art as Phillips narrows losses to £8.7m
The auction house’s first-half sales jumped 60% to $507m, driven by a strategic pivot to luxury timepieces that outperformed modern and contemporary art, signalling a major demographic shift in the high-end collectibles market.
Phillips achieved $507m in total auction sales during the first half of 2026, a 60% increase from the same period in 2025. The privately owned auction house sold 90% of offered lots, with nearly 70% of those transactions completed entirely online.
In a significant shift for the high-end collectables market, watch sales have overtaken the firm's traditional modern and contemporary art division. Timepiece auctions, held in association with Bacs & Russo, generated $235m, more than doubling the $115m recorded in 2025. By comparison, modern and contemporary art brought in $224m, up from $149m the prior year.
Three of the year’s five top-selling lots were watches, led by an F.P. Journe Chronomètre à Résonance that fetched $13.9m in New York. The top lot overall was Andy Warhol’s Sixteen Jackies (1964) at $16.2m. Chief executive Martin Wilson attributed the watch boom to a decade-long effort to cultivate an online community, arguing younger buyers are driving a broader shift. "Everyone talks about this great wealth transfer, but I think it's more of a great taste transfer," Wilson said. "The younger generations see the world differently, what they collect is much more connected with their values."
This demographic pivot is highly visible on Phillips' Dropshop digital platform, launched in 2023. Nearly 60% of buyers on the platform this year were Millennial and Gen Z collectors, with 70% of them entirely new to the auction house. Across all categories, 40% of buyers in the first half were first-time Phillips customers.
High-value art collections still anchored the business, such as the $18m sale of US diplomat John L. Loeb’s Danish art across London and New York. However, Wilson stressed that the overall growth resulted from deliberate strategy rather than a general market upswing. "The broader change in the market plays a part, but for us [sales growth] has a lot to do with very conscious strategic choices that we made about the areas that we can lead in," he said. "If you offer things of quality, you will always find buyers—the Loeb collection was a perfect example of offering something which is absolutely right for the market and in a way that's really attractive. It’s not an accident, it's really disciplined focus on what we're trying to achieve."
Operational innovations are also changing how business is conducted. Wilson noted that "innovation is meaningless unless it actually does something which makes the experience of buying and selling better," pointing to a recent introduction of priority bidding. The system allows buyers to submit non-retractable bids before a sale in exchange for a reduced buyer's premium. "We've now got three times as many buying bids before a sale than we had a year ago, 300% growth," Wilson said. "Our sales are now routinely 40% to 50% sold before the auctioneer even takes his place in the rostrum, and that's really meaningful for sellers."
The financial returns of this digital and demographic pivot are tangible. Recent UK Companies House filings for Phillips Assets Ltd, the holding company for the auctioneer's operations, show group losses narrowing significantly from £45m in 2023 to £8.7m in 2024.
