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Global sales at Christie’s staged a slight recovery in 2025 as the auction house increased its focus on luxury goods to attract a new generation of buyers and combat a multiyear art market slump.
Christie’s, founded in 1766, said the value of the items it sold in 2025 was set to reach $6.2bn, a 6 per cent increase on the previous year.
Sales of luxury goods, such as handbags and jewellery, were in line to rise 17 per cent to $795mn, making it the house’s second-biggest category — still well behind the $2.9bn of 20th- and 21st-century art it sold this year.
Auction houses have been trying to adapt their business models as older collectors with traditional tastes die and younger collectors show less early interest in expensive fine art. Christie’s and rival Sotheby’s are both using luxury to attract younger customers in newer markets.
Of Christie’s new customers, 38 per cent made their first purchase in the luxury category. The overall share of millennial and Gen-Z clients rose from 30 per cent last year to 33 per cent in 2025.
Auction houses enjoyed a post-pandemic art market boom in 2021 and 2022, which dramatically fell away the year after, largely thanks to political uncertainty in the US and slower economic growth in China.
Bonnie Brennan, Christie’s chief executive since February, said that “market momentum” in the second half of the year, brought by a steady supply of quality lots, helped lift the group’s total sales by more than a quarter on the same period in 2024.
However, the growth was not global. Auction sales rose 15 per cent in the US to $2.6bn and 2 per cent to $1.4bn in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, but fell 5 per cent to $686mn in the smaller Asia-Pacific business. The business will not file accounts showing its 2025 revenues and profits until next year.
Private sales, as opposed to public auctions, were flat at $1.5bn, although they included the three highest prices for artworks this year, Christie’s said.
In July, Brennan told the Financial Times she hoped US President Donald Trump’s package of economic policies could benefit wealthier Americans and corporations, and would “breed confidence”, adding: “When there’s volatility in the market, people get distracted, they retreat.”
Speaking to the Financial Times about the sales figures, Ben Gore, chief operating officer, said further cuts to interest rates “would be a positive tailwind” for the business.
The art market experienced an uptick towards the end of the year. A portrait by Gustav Klimt sold for $236.4mn at Sotheby’s in New York in November, becoming the most expensive modern work of art sold at auction.
Auction sales globally fell 20 per cent to $23.4bn in 2024, the lowest level since 2020, according to the Art Basel/UBS Art Market Report 2025, “with double-digit declines in the value and volume of sales in the $10mn-plus segment”.
