FredBloggs wrote:Investment? Nope. Even very old veteran pocket watches in solid gold made to incredibly high hand made standards are only worth their gold scrap value. Best thought of as jewellery and family hand me downs. Take a look what you can buy used Rolex and Breitlings for, that will answer your question.
(Bloggs - owner of 1 x Rolex and 2 x Breitling chronometers).
Rolex generally have the lowest depreciation of any luxury watch, but this is still relative to the price. If you buy a 20K watch and it drops in value by only 10% thats 2K, if you buy a £1000 watch and it drops by 50% thats £500, so the question is do you really like the more expensive watch enough to lose an extra £1,500?
Of course if you never sell the watch this is all academic, just buy the watch you like.
Servicing, you should expect a cost of 5%-10% of the watches value every 5 to 10 years, chronographs and other complications will cost more to service and
significantly more to repair.
For mechanical watches in the £500 to £5000 price bracket, a big change is currently underway with respect to movements, for years these would all have standard Swiss ETA movements the advantage of ETA is that, being made in large quantities they would only cost £50-£200 so when these watches have a mechanical problem you just swap out the whole movement. Easy and cheap.
Swatch who own ETA are in the process of restricting it's use to their own brands. I can see the sense in this, why would anyone buy an expensive Longines whan you can get a cheap Tissot with exactly the same movement inside?
The effect of this is that a whole bunch of non Swatch brands (Baume & Mercier, Bremont, Breitling, TAG, IWC) are now having to produce their own in-house movements, in some cases for the first time. An increasing number of in-house movements will probably see price rises at the lower end and more competition/lower prices at the higher end as they compete with existing in-house movements.