Articles and News

New York, NY—A Grand Complication watch by A. Lange & Söhne carries a price tag of more than $2,450,000. No, that’s not what it fetched at a rare timepiece auction; that’s just the price. A Greubel Forseys Art Piece 1 goes for a mere $1,650,000, while three quarters of a million will buy an Audemars Piguet Grand Complication Royal Oak Offshore ($756,000 in rose gold or $710,000 in titanium).

The ranks of the exceptionally wealthy are growing exponentially, says a recent article in Forbes magazine. These aren’t your garden-variety rich folks who live in a $2.5 million house; a $2.5 million watch, a described in the article, is a whole different level of wealth.

The new super-rich, especially in places like China and Russia, make the Kardashians look like paupers. A decade ago, there were no Chinese billionaires on the annual Forbes list. Today there are 122, says an article in Elle. Even in places like Bangalore, India, where the wealthy traditionally tended to toward restraint, weddings of the wealthy have become ever more lavish, jumping in price from the equivalent of a few thousand US dollars for a wedding banquet to a feast costing upwards of half a million.

As a result of all this new wealth, says Forbes, sales of extreme luxury also are booming. With prices upwards of $25,000 per night, suites at the world’s top luxury hotels are routinely booked. Sales of watches from the high five figures into the low seven-figures are commonplace among this group. To wit, Doug Gollan, editor in chief of Elite Traveler, told Forbes the combined wealth of ultra-high net worth individuals last year increased by $566 billion—enough to buy every luxury Swiss watch exported for the next 28 years.

Top image: Watchtime.com