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Sotheby’s Private Sales Hit Hard in 2014 Even as Transactions Increased

August 12, 2014 by Marion Maneker

Sotheby's Private

Philip Boroff knows his way around an SEC filing. He went through Sotheby’s recent earnings to come up with these interesting numbers on the short-term drop in Sotheby’s private sales business which CEO Ruprecht reminds us is a “chunky” business. The most interesting piece of news isn’t the big drop itself, nearly half the value of the previous period, but the fact that transactions increased but were obviously at a much lower value:

Long a focus of company executives, private sales tumbled 48 percent in the first half of the year, according to an August 8 Securities and Exchange Commission filing. The value of private transactions, in which Sotheby’s discretely brokers art and other collectibles to one prospective purchaser at a time, dived to $294 million in the first half of 2014 from $561 million a year earlier. It was the lowest private sales total since 2010. The drop contributed to a 15 percent decline in quarterly earnings and an 8 percent drop in Sotheby’s stock on Friday.

In the first half of this year, private sales accounted for 8 percent of Sotheby’s overall sales. Private sales commissions for 2014′s first half were $30 million, down by a quarter from a year earlier.

Besides accentuating the positive, Sotheby’s hasn’t offered many explanations about the setback. In an August 8 press release summarizing its results for the year’s first half, it highlighted a 41 percent jump in the number of private transactions while ignoring the dollar value slump.

What Sotheby’s Doesn’t Want You To Know About Its Private Sales  (artnet News)

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Filed Under: General

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