Hamza Masood is the Business Development Manager at WatchCharts.com, which has kindly allowed us to share their monthly Market Updates.

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Welcome to our first watch market update of the year. Going forward, we will be splitting up our monthly market updates into two sections. The first, “What happened in insert month here“, will cover the performance of the overall market, the Big Three, and other major brands and key collections every month.

The second, “In Focus”, will highlight one particular segment of the market which is particularly interesting or relevant as of the time of writing. Follow along to know what’s going on in the watch market!

What happened in January 2025?

January 2025 saw straight declines across the board for the WatchCharts Overall Market Index which fell by -0.9%, as well as for the Rolex (-0.8%), Patek Philippe (-0.9%), and Audemars Piguet (-0.5%) indexes. These declines are comparable to what we observed a year ago in February 2024 and two years ago in February 2023.

To the extent there may be seasonality in market performance trends, the first month of 2025 is following the trend from the last two years.

WatchCharts Overall-Market Index February 2025

Approximately two thirds of the watches in all four of the aforementioned indexes fell in value over the past month, underscoring the continued broad-based decline of the secondary market.

WatchCharts Brand-Performance January 2025

Performance by Brand

The chart above shows the performance in January of the major brands that we track. Compared to last month when four brands had seen slight improvement, this month only Zenith remains from that while the others have all dropped into negative territory for the month. 

Jaeger-LeCoultre is flat at 0.0% for January, while all other brands with index values above $3,000 saw declines. Breitling is one of the worst performing brands for the second month in a row, losing over 2% in index value while TAG Heuer saw the worst performance, falling -2.4% in January.

Best and Worst Performing Collections of the Month

Some of the best and worst performing collections of January are listed below. Of the nearly 200 collections that we track across all price points, only 15% were flat or up for the month, while the rest all saw declines ranging from -0.1% (for example the Patek Philippe Aquanaut collection) to -7.7% (for the Seiko SKX collection).

In Focus: Patek Philippe Discontinuations

Similar to last year, Patek Philippe has discontinued references from across its catalog at the beginning of February, though retail prices seem to have remained unchanged thus far. In all, we estimate that more than 10 references have been discontinued, including:

• Nautilus 5712/1A
• Aquanaut 5167/1A
• Calatrava Travel Time 5524G
• Calatrava Travel Time Alarm 5520P
• Grand Complications Split Second Chronograph 5370P

There has been no immediate impact to the secondary market prices for these watches from their discontinuation, though this is to be expected since the secondary watch market moves relatively slowly.

In the medium term, we may expect prices to see a slight increase, similar to what happened with the Patek Philippe Aquanaut Travel Time reference 5164A in steel, which was discontinued in February 2024 and has since seen its price appreciate by +10% since then (performing better than 95% of Patek models in that time).

However, any hype generated from a watch’s discontinuation is unlikely to have an impact on its long-term performance.

Patek Philippe will almost certainly announce new models in these highly desirable collections at Watches & Wonders in April 2025, and the wheel of hype will continue to turn.

Note on Index composition: All WatchCharts indexes are weighted by the annual transaction value of the watches within. Indexes are rebalanced once per year on January 1st, with weightings assigned based on the sum of annual transaction values of the previous year. Each index page on the website lists the watches comprising that index in the current year.

* Hamza Masood is the Business Development Manager at WatchCharts.com. You can check out previous Market Updates at https://watchcharts.com/articles/category/dispatch and there are more market insights and analysis on their YouTube channel at www.youtube.com/watchcharts

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