Closing The Loop

Watch brands are beginning to enter the pre-owned market for their timepieces, with potential industry-wide effects.

- Jamie Tan

Lower prices, side-stepping that first hit of depreciation on a brand-new watch, or obtaining timepieces that have gone out of production: These are some local watch collectors’ oft-cited reasons for embracing the pre-owned timepiece market. Sales director Paul Cheong, who has been collecting timepieces for some 15 years (and appears in the collectors’ feature elsewhere in this magazine), often scours websites for older pieces that you won’t see on retail shelves. He shares: “I don’t believe in paying a premium for watches. Also, today, you won’t be able to find many of my watches new, such as those by Gerald Genta and Daniel Roth.”

Cheong is not alone. In the Trends Report 2018 published by the Fondation de la Haute Horlogerie, financial consultancy Kepler Cheuvreux estimated the global market for second-hand watches to be worth US$5 billion (S$6.8 billion) a year. Size aside, this segment has posted annual growth rates of 5 per cent, outperforming the market for new watches.

BRANDS WANT IN

These tantalising figures have not gone unnoticed by industry chiefs, several of whom have recently made statements about their plans to enter the pre-owned watch game. These include Audemars Piguet, MB&F, Richard Mille and Breitling, although Richemont Group – the conglomerate behind brands like Jaeger-LeCoultre and Cartier – also made its intentions clear when it acquired Watchfinder, a UK-based pre-owned watch retailer, this June. No longer are brands content with watching from the sidelines.