This Patek Philippe is most expensive watch ever sold at online auction

At Christie’s “Top of the Time” online auction based out of the auction house’s Hong Kong branch, a Patek Philippe ‘Sky Moon Tourbillon’ sold for $5.8 million (HK $45.4 million) to an anonymous buyer.

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

The rare watch, part of Patek’s Grand Complications series, features 12 complications such as 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 features a hand-made blue cloisonné and champlevé enamel dial and is encased in an 18-karat white gold case that took craftsmen more than 100 hours to make. The watch was originally sold to a buyer in 2015 at the Patek Philippe Salon in Geneva.

For a watch market that has been wobbling as of late, the record-breaking sale of this Patek was welcome news.

"This is a super rare and complicated watch, but this sale demonstrates 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 these uber rare timepieces. This watch checks almost every box, but aside from that some may see high grade watches as a safe place to park money given all the recent banking turmoil."

Recently the second-hand watch market has seen values drop from all-time highs back in early 2022, coming back down to Earth following a pandemic and crypto-related boom. That being said, the pre-owned watch market is expected to keep growing, hitting 10% CAGR (compound annual growth rate) through 2026, according to BCG.

“There continues to be an extremely vibrant market for watches across the world, evidenced through the avid global bidding this sale witnessed, which further cements Hong Kong’s status as an international epicenter for watch collecting,” said Alexandre Bigler, Christie’s Asia Pacific VP and head of watches, in a statement.