Watches - an investment?

[JMN2]

I bought a kinetic Seiko around 1997 in Kingston shopping centre Bentalls IIRC, it died after a few years. I bought two CWC quartz army watches in mid 00's and gave one to my dad, he swears he has never changed the battery and it's still going, apparently. I have changed the battery perhaps 3 times.

[Paultry]

When I lived in Sharjah I bought a Tissot watch for my son, Christmas day 1999, and I happen to be wearing it now, and its fine.

At that time watches in the £200 to £600 price bracket in the UK were around two thirds the price in the Emirates, and were fixed prices regardless of outlet. However, I made an enquiry on someones behalf for a UK price £20k Rolex and found it to be more expensive there.

I need a new watch, I have two Tissots which are clogged up, but the price of repair is too high compared to buying a new one.

I know its a long shot, but has any LF recently being in the Emirates and done a watch price comparison? Paul

[Lanark]

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.

[Lanark]

When I lived in Sharjah I bought a Tissot watch for my son, Christmas day 1999, and I happen to be wearing it now, and its fine.

At that time watches in the £200 to £600 price bracket in the UK were around two thirds the price in the Emirates, and were fixed prices regardless of outlet. However, I made an enquiry on someones behalf for a UK price £20k Rolex and found it to be more expensive there.

I need a new watch, I have two Tissots which are clogged up, but the price of repair is too high compared to buying a new one.

I know its a long shot, but has any LF recently being in the Emirates and done a watch price comparison? Paul

My bold and red - No but I have looked at Apple gear in Dubai duty free shops compared to the UK. The price is exactly the same minus the 20% VAT. So it is worth buying there, made more attractive because I believe I can cash in my pretty much next to useless Emirates air miles and get about GBP 230 knocked off the price so well worth buying there when I pass through shortly. I imagine the same price minus VAT will apply to watches too perhaps?

You will still be liable to pay the VAT + import tax when bringing the watch back to the UK.
While you may be able to 'wing it', if you get caught avoiding the tax it is treated as a criminal offence!

Thanks to current exchange rates the UK is now one of the cheapest places to buy a luxury watch.

[DiamondEcho]

Just mentioning this in case it's not generally known. I have previously been - in as many words - invited to negotiate, haggle, the price of a Swi$$ watch at a jeweller at Heathrow airport. I was also told that if they didn't currently stock precisely what I had in mind they could get it in and hold it for me. This was a long time ago now, late 90s when I was through HRW every other week and often spent some idle time admiring the baubles.
The impression I had was that at the time manufacturers/distributors had set list-prices, and perhaps discounting on the high street was very rare. Somewhere like HRW the sales staff must have been rabid for sales commission.

Long time ago now, back when considering at a major purchase I had the balls to ask just about any retailer what their best price was. In retrospect though it's amazing how often I would be offered a deal! Sadly I'm way too chicken these days