Market desk · about 8 minutes
A recovery you can locate.
Both large houses finished 2025 ahead of 2024. The useful question is where the extra money sat: which channel, which category, which half of the year.
What each house actually published
Sotheby’s put its projected consolidated sales at $7 billion, up 17% from $6 billion. Within that, public auctions were $5.7 billion, up 26% from $4.5 billion, and private sales were $1.2 billion, a shade under the prior year’s $1.3 billion. Fine art was $4.3 billion. Luxury was $2.7 billion, which the house called its highest luxury total. Those two category numbers add to the headline. The channel numbers, rounded, come out a tenth short of it. Treat the headline as a rounded total, not as a sum you can rebuild to the dollar.
Christie’s put the year at $6.2 billion, up 6%. Public auctions were $4.7 billion, up 8%. Private sales held at $1.5 billion and were about 24% of the global figure. The second half was the sharp part of the story at both houses: each reported second-half sales about 26% above the second half of 2024. A full-year percentage hides that shape. The market people felt in May was not the market they felt in November.
Set 2024 beside it and the Christie’s split is clearer. That year the house reported $5.7 billion, down 6%. Auctions fell harder, to $4.2 billion, down 16%. Private sales rose 41% to $1.5 billion. Sell-through was 86%. The hammer-to-low-estimate index was 112%, meaning the aggregate of hammers sat 12% above the aggregate of low estimates. It does not mean a typical lot made 12% over its low estimate. Eighty-one percent of bids were placed online, and 30% of clients were described as millennial or Gen Z.
Scale is Sotheby’s $7 billion headline. Private sales are marked in burgundy because they are a channel, not a remainder.
Do not add across the axes
A house reports at least two cuts of the same year. One cut is the channel: a lot knocked down in a room or online, versus a work sold by private treaty. The other cut, at Sotheby’s, is the category: fine art versus luxury. A jewel sold privately is private and luxury. If you add the private total to the luxury total you have counted that jewel twice. Christie’s does not publish a luxury number that is the complement of its art sales, so its $795 million luxury line cannot be laid on top of Sotheby’s $2.7 billion as if the two accountants had used the same drawers.
The same dollar can be private and luxury. Adding the rows invents a market.
There is a third number that is neither sales channel nor category. Sotheby’s Financial Services ended 2025 with a loan portfolio above $1.8 billion. That is a balance of credit, often secured by art and objects. It is not turnover. Folding it into “$7 billion of sales” mixes a stock with a flow.
Luxury did the visible growing
Within its own definition, Sotheby’s luxury sales rose 22% to $2.7 billion. The Art Newspaper reported Christie’s luxury turnover up 17% to $795 million. The gap is partly a gap of scope. RM Sotheby’s, the group’s motor-car business, passed $1 billion of annual sales for the first time and sits inside the luxury figure. Cars alone can move a “luxury” headline by more than Christie’s entire reported luxury line. Read the word only after you know whether motor cars, handbags, watches, and jewels are in the drawer.
Neither house publishes profit. A higher total with a higher share of guaranteed or privately negotiated property can be a weaker business than a smaller, cleaner auction year. These pages stop at the reported top line.
Asia’s bidding was specific
Sotheby’s said the three most active categories in Asia, by bidding volume, were watches, then jewelry, then Chinese works of art. Watch auction totals there rose 10%. Two single-owner sales did the heavy public lifting: works from the Okada Museum of Art totalled HK$690 million and sold through, and the Ise Collection totalled HK$359 million with 99% sold. Together they were reported near HK$1.05 billion, about $134 million. That is a pair of collection totals. It is not a price for one scroll.
The dearest single lot the house reported in Asia was a cursive-script calligraphy by Rao Jie, at HK$250 million. The house called it a record for calligraphy at Sotheby’s, and the most expensive lot it sold in Asia that year. A record for a category inside one house is not a record for all of Asian art, and it is not evidence that the lot beneath it in the same sale followed it up.
A new week on the Gulf calendar
In December 2025 Sotheby’s held a first Collectors’ Week in Abu Dhabi and described it as the first auctions staged in that city by an international house. The week totalled $133.4 million across cars, real estate, watches, jewelry, and handbags. Bidders came from 35 countries. The house said 23% of buyers were from the UAE, 28% were new clients, and about 30% of bidders were under 40. A week-long total mixes categories that do not share buyers. Use it as a sign that a room existed and that new clients walked into it. Do not use it as an index level for any one category.
Watches, from a white-glove night to a model count
Sotheby’s called 2025 its strongest year for watches. One New York sale of important watches in December was a white-glove result: all 188 lots sold, for nearly $42.8 million, with an average of 16 bidders on a lot and eight lots above $1 million. In Abu Dhabi, a set of four Patek Philippe Star Caliber 2000 pocket watches made $11.9 million, described as the second most valuable watch result in that house’s history. “Second at one house” leaves the world record elsewhere. The Patek Philippe Grandmaster Chime sold at Christie’s Geneva in 2019 for CHF 31 million.
A different kind of number comes from outside the houses. EveryWatch, writing in Europa Star, put the May 2024 Geneva auctions — Sotheby’s, Christie’s, Phillips, and Antiquorum together — at $122.7 million, up 4.24%, on 1,056 lots, with an unsold rate of 10.51%. Patek Philippe accounted for $52 million from 204 lots. The Rolex Daytona was the most frequent model in that reading, with 71 appearances and an average near $150,000. Frequency is not importance. A model that appears 71 times is a market. A watch that appears once is an event.
Jewelry, the last full published comparison
Rapaport’s review of 2024 jewelry auctions is the last wide comparison sitting in public before the 2025 house headlines. It put Christie’s jewelry at $415.8 million, Sotheby’s at $270 million, and Phillips at $59 million. Bonhams’ jewelry total was not available in that ranking. Top lots in the same review: an Eden Rose ring, a 10.20-carat fancy intense pink, at $13.3 million at Christie’s; a 6.21-carat fancy intense pink, type IIa, at $12 million at Phillips; the 55.55-carat D-flawless Fortune Five at $5.8 million at Sotheby’s; a Mouawad toi-et-moi of blue and pink diamonds at $3.8 million at Bonhams. Sotheby’s later said its jewelry sales rose about 18% in 2025. That sentence does not restate the 2024 dollar total, so the two years cannot be stacked without the missing base.
Rapaport’s 2024 jewelry review. Bonhams omitted because the total was not published there. This is not a 2025 chart.
A short list of bad arithmetic
Adding Christie’s and Sotheby’s and calling the sum “the global auction market” leaves out Phillips, Bonhams, regional houses, dealers, and every private sale that never touches a catalogue. Calling 2025 a boom because one Klimt made $236.4 million ignores the lots that failed, and ignores that Christie’s public auctions had fallen 16% only a year earlier. Calling online bidding of 81% the death of the room ignores why evening sales still fill chairs: the theatre is part of how a trophy is convinced into public. The intelligence is the split, kept split.
Where the figures live
- The Art Newspaper, 17 December 2025 — both houses’ year-end shape, and the luxury comparison.
- The Value, on Sotheby’s 2025 — channel split, Asia, Abu Dhabi, watches, cars, the Birkin.
- Christie’s release, $6.2bn for 2025
- Christie’s release, $5.7bn for 2024
- Europa Star / EveryWatch, Geneva, May 2024 — a third-party sum across houses, not a house total.
- Rapaport, jewelry auctions 2024
