The Next Generation of Collectors: Taking the Saleroom Stage

The room where the world’s rarest watches change hands has changed who sits in it. Alexandre Ghotbi has watched it happen from the front. As a deputy chairman at Phillips and its head of watches for Europe and the Middle East, he stands at the far end of the market, the end where the exceptional piece comes to be sold, and the people raising their paddles there have changed. They are younger than the settled circle he once knew, they come from further away, and they have quietly rewritten what the market wants.

The numbers from a single season carry the point. Across the first half of 2026, first-time buyers made up 40 percent of Phillips’s bidders, and millennials and Gen Z together accounted for a third of everyone in the room. These are not the traditional collectors of watch lore, the European and American men who built their holdings over decades. They are new, and they arrived in force. New collectors come to the market on a regular basis, Ghotbi says, and from a much wider range of places, with rising numbers of younger buyers from the Middle East and Asia beside the Europeans and Americans. “The more people you have in the market while the supply stays more or less the same,” he says, “the higher the prices go.”

The generation that reversed the order

What makes this generation matter is the direction it brought, because it ran against the usual order. In most collecting fields the young arrive and learn the taste already in place. Here it reversed. The younger collectors are more open to new makers and to different kinds of design, Ghotbi says, and that openness has opened the eyes of the traditional collectors too, who see there are other kinds of pieces worth having. “For once it is the new generation that has shifted the market,” he says, “and the older generation is following.”

The change shows most clearly in what a name is worth. For a long time the great collectors bought the established maisons above all, Rolex and Patek Philippe first among them. The newcomers kept that interest and widened it. With this generation, Ghotbi says, it has far less to do with the brand than with the watch itself, and the fact that a piece comes from a small independent maker nobody has heard of no longer means it will sell badly. Today, in his words, it is much less about the brand than about the type of watch.

Why the saleroom became the door

That opening explains why the auction room has become the place these collectors go at all. The makers they now chase are rarely the large maisons that fill shop windows. They are independents who produce a handful of watches a year, with waiting lists that stretch a decade or more, and the saleroom is the one door that opens without the wait. These are modern independent watchmakers who make just a handful of watches, Ghotbi says, with a waiting list of maybe ten or fifteen years. “Collectors go where they can actually access these works, and that is at auction.”

He is careful to say which part of the market he means, because most of it is not his. There is the primary market, the watch bought new from the maker, which the auction house leaves alone. There is the secondary market, the pre-owned watch resold, which it leaves alone too. Phillips works only the third and narrowest band, the rare collectible, the high-end piece. And that band, he says, is the one he can only see growing, because the demand for it keeps arriving.

The proof of the independent’s new standing came in his own saleroom in June, when Phillips New York sold the F.P. Journe Chronomètre à Résonance “Souscription, No. 007” for 13.9 million dollars. It was the top lot of the entire season across every auction company in the world, and the highest price ever paid for a watch by an independent maker. Journe built the piece early, when almost no one outside a small circle knew his name. The object waited, and the market grew toward it.

What the new collector is paying for

Ask Ghotbi why these watches command what they do, and he sets the mechanism aside at once. A rare watch is priced for far more than how it runs. “You don’t buy a vintage car from the 1950s for its engine,” he says. “You buy it for the history, the rarity, the beauty, the relevance. It is the same for a watch. Nobody collects a car because they like the colour of the paint. They do it for its importance, its history.” The mechanical side, in his telling, is only one part of a larger whole.

The movement tells the time. Everything gathered around it, the history it can prove, the scarcity written into how few were made, the name of whoever owned it before, is what the collector is paying for. Pressed on whether the appeal comes down to the mechanics in the end, he widens the frame rather than narrowing it. “It is not only the mechanics,” he says. “It is the beauty of it, the design of it. There are a lot of elements. It has to be the whole watch together.”

When a watch reached the price of a painting

That understanding, that a watch can stand as a made object worth keeping and studying, is what lifted the prices to a level the trade had never seen. Ghotbi has watched the sums climb across his whole career. Collecting watches at auction is a young pursuit, begun only in the late 1980s, and it took roughly forty years before a single wristwatch first sold for around ten million dollars, a Patek Philippe from the 1940s, in 2016. Paul Newman’s Rolex Daytona followed a year later at about seventeen million. Then the pace changed entirely. “Two years ago, ten million was a big deal,” Ghotbi says. “Today a million is a lot of money, but it no longer impresses anyone. You can just see the shift. Today, watches are playing in the same category as art.”

The comparison holds against his own numbers. In the opening months of 2026, the highest price Phillips realised for any single work in its January art sales was an Andy Warhol at sixteen million dollars, and the watches of the spring season rose to stand beside that level. What was unheard of two years ago has become the ordinary weather of the saleroom.

Two markets, and where India stands

Underneath the headline sums, Ghotbi sees the market settle into two clear levels, and he keeps them apart. On one sit the commercial pieces, the watches found without much searching, which move at the pace of any traded good, sometimes at a premium, sometimes at half their retail price. On the other sit the exceptional pieces, vintage or modern, which follow a different rule. There are basically two levels now, he says: the commercial pieces that can be found easily, which may sell at a premium or at half retail, and the very exceptional pieces, modern or vintage, for which there is more and more demand and fewer and fewer of them.

The exceptional level answers to scarcity in its purest form, and it is where the young collector and the independent maker meet. Demand grows each season, the supply of genuinely rare pieces holds where it is, and the distance between the two widens. The piece can be a vintage buy, Ghotbi says, or a modern watch from a maker of thirty a year that people have never heard of, and that still sells for five million euros.

The wider map has its blank spaces, and Ghotbi names one without softening it. For all the talk of Asia, the largest market of all has yet to arrive. “In India we don’t have many clients,” he says. “The ones we do have are based in the UK. The huge market that India represents has not entered the auction world yet. Hopefully it will come soon.” He counts the rest of the map with the same precision, and the method tells its own story. He sorts collectors by where they live rather than by the passport they hold, since a European may bid from the Gulf and an American from Hong Kong. The old geography of collecting has loosened, and the new one is drawn around where wealth has settled.

Where the exceptional is shown

That end of the market keeps its own gathering places, and Geneva remains the oldest and the surest of them. In September the city gives itself over to the Geneva Watch Days, and the roll of names that assembles maps where the exceptional now lives, the independent makers who work in tens rather than thousands among them, De Bethune and MB&F, Laurent Ferrier and Urwerk and Ferdinand Berthoud. Phillips takes its place in that company, showing the pieces it considers worth the journey, set among the makers whose work fills its salerooms. Ghotbi speaks of the week as a fixture he keeps, one where Phillips exhibits some of its highlights and shows the important pieces still to come.

Those pieces are already gathering for the autumn sales in Geneva, Hong Kong and New York, though he holds their names back for now. For the second half of the year he expects the discipline of the first to hold. Phillips sold as much across the first six months of 2026 as it had in all of 2024, and he sees no reason for the line to bend. The first six months showed incredible strength, he says, and short of a serious shock to the world economy, he sees the market holding its track.

The exceptional piece keeps its buyers because it keeps its scarcity, and the generation that arrived last is the one deciding what counts as exceptional now. They came in without the old loyalties, looked at the object before the label, and the whole room turned to follow them. The movement still tells the time. The rest tells the story, and the story is what the youngest buyers taught the market to want.