Neither the covid nor the war in Ukraine have had an effect on the two auction houses, which have broken all records this year.
The two auction houses Christie’s and Sotheby’s, controlled by French businessman François Pinault and entrepreneur and businessman Patrick Drahi respectively, have achieved record sales in 2022.
Christie’s announced a record year in 2022 with $8.4 billion in sales, boosted by the historic Paul Allen (the co-founder of Microsoft, who died in 2018) collection reaching a record $1.62 billion.
In detail, this result is the sum of 7.2 billion in realised sales at auction and 1.2 billion in private sales. This is better than the 7.1 billion dollars of 2021, after a year 2020 complicated by the Covid-19 pandemic. For the CEO of Christie’s, Guillaume Cerutti, this performance, “despite a difficult macro-environment” is explained in particular by “the resilience of the art and luxury markets and the remarkable success of several major collections”.
Behind Christie’s, Sotheby’s has nevertheless announced record sales projections of 8 billion dollars (compared to 7.3 billion in 2021). These figures include sales of art, luxury goods, but also residences and classic cars. The auction house points out that its customer base in Asia is “growing rapidly” and that collectors from that continent are “spending more per person on average”.
In 2022, buyers from North and South America are increasing (40% in value against 35% in 2021) and those from Asia-Pacific are decreasing (from 31% to 26%). According to Christie’s, these very good results are stimulated by “a new generation of collectors: 35% of buyers in 2022 were new and 34% of them were millenials (born in the 1980s and 1990s)”.
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Featured photo : © Christie’s
