This rare Patek Philippe Sky Moon Tourbillon Watch sells for $5.8 million at Christie's Top of the Time auction

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This rare Patek Philippe Sky Moon Tourbillon Watch sells for $5.8 million at Christie's Top of the Time auction

A Patek Philippe Sky Moon Tourbillon sold for $5.8 million HK $45.4 million at Christie's Top of the Time online auction based out of auction house's Hong Kong outfit.

This stunning Patek Philippe timepiece set a new record for an online auction, using a new avenue that is gaining more and more traction for the pre-owned watch industry.

The rare watch, part of Patek's Grand Complications series, featured 12 complications such as the Cathedral minute repeating, tourbillon, perpetual calendar, retrograde date, moon phases, Leap Year indication, sidereal time, sky chart, and phases and orbit of the moon. The watch face has a hand-made blue cloisonn and champlev enamel dial, and is encased in a 18 K white gold case that took craftsmen over 100 hours to make. In 2015, the watch was sold to a buyer at the Patek Philippe Salon in Geneva.

The record-breaking sale of this Patek was welcomed news for a watch market that has been wobbling as of late.

This is a super rare and complicated watch, but this sale shows that there is real demand for expensive high-quality investment-grade watches, says Paul Altieri, founder and CEO of pre-owned watch dealer Bob's Watches. The Sky'' is the limit to what serious collectors will pay for special uber rare timepieces. Due to the recent banking turmoil, this watch checks almost every box, but some may see high grade watches as a safe place to park money. The second-hand watch market recently saw values drop from all-time highs back in early 2022, coming back down to Earth after a Pandemic and a Cryptocurrency-related boom. The pre-owned watch market is expected to grow, hitting 10% CAGR compound annual growth rate through 2026, according to BCG.

In a statement, Alexandre Bigler, Christie's Asia Pacific VP and head of watches, said there is an extremely vibrant market for watches across the world, evidenced by the avid global bidding this sale witnessed.

The Christie's Top of the Time auction pulled in $5.8 million in sales, with participating bids coming from 48 countries with millennials making up 40% of the buyers at auction. Bigler said that this sale lays a strong foundation for our Spring Auctions in May at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, where we look forward to presenting more exceptional timepieces for our valued clients and watch enthusiasts.

Industry king Rolex is teasing some features of models it will have on display.

It is even more important for us in the pre-owned space as we were anxious to see which models will be discontinued - prices almost always jump about 10% on these models, according to Paul Altieri, the period before Watches and Wonders begins and following.