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Your morning briefing on the luxury and collectibles markets. Today: markets steady after a brutal two days, but China's big mid-year shopping festival flashes a warning for luxury; a 25.6 million dollar jade necklace tops our jewelry database; the Netherlands and Germany agree to return 2,000 looted treasures to Ghana; and the art world remembers a pioneer of kinetic art.
Good morning. It's Wednesday, June 24. I'm Sharon, and this is Open Bid from ALT/FNDATA.
This episode of Open Bid is brought to you by ALT/FNDATA, the market intelligence platform for insights on the luxury markets and related public equities. With a membership, you can unlock access to dashboards, reports and cutting-edge insights to keep your finger on the pulse of the market and drive your competitive advantage. Learn more at altfndata.com/membership.
Today: markets try to steady after a brutal two days, but China's big mid-year shopping festival flashes a warning for luxury, a 25.6 million dollar jade necklace tops our jewelry database, the Netherlands and Germany agree to return 2,000 looted treasures to Ghana, and the art world says goodbye to a pioneer of kinetic art. Plus Luxury Spending is out today.
We begin with the markets, which tried to find their footing this morning after two punishing sessions. Yesterday's selloff was severe, with the Nasdaq down about 4 percent on fresh fears of a Federal Reserve rate hike. But in Europe today, the big luxury names steadied. LVMH and Hermès each opened up about half a percent, and Brunello Cucinelli edged higher as well. The exceptions were the same names that have led the way down all week. Burberry fell another 2.5 percent, and the watch retailer Watches of Switzerland slipped for a third straight day, off about 2.9 percent. The more important signal, though, came from China. The country's 618 festival, its huge mid-year online shopping event, has just wrapped, and the numbers were soft. Total online sales grew just 4 percent from a year ago, a sharp slowdown from more than 15 percent the year before, according to the data firm Syntun. For a luxury industry that leans heavily on the Chinese shopper, that is a warning sign. And one detail from the same data is squarely in our world. Sales of secondhand and pre-owned goods jumped nearly 80 percent, as Chinese consumers traded down. The resale economy keeps growing even as the market for new goods cools, a dynamic we track every day.
And yet at the very top, the Chinese taste for the finest things is undimmed. One of the top jewelry results in our database so far this year is a magnificent jadeite bead and coloured diamond necklace, which sold for 25.6 million dollars at Christie's last month. A word on why that matters. Jadeite is the highest grade of jade, and it is the most prized gemstone in all of Chinese culture. The very best strands of translucent, imperial-green jadeite beads are rarer than fine diamonds, and they command prices to match. So in the very same season that the mass-market Chinese consumer is pulling back, a single collector at the top of the market paid 25.6 million dollars for one necklace. It is the same split we see right across luxury: a cautious middle, and a firm and dazzling top.
Now to a significant moment in the long reckoning over colonial-era looting. The Netherlands and Germany have agreed to return more than 2,000 cultural artefacts to Ghana, most of them taken during the colonial period. The Dutch will hand back some 2,000 objects from their national collections, among them a gold ceremonial pipe that the Asante king gave to the Dutch monarch back in 1837. Germany is returning a smaller group of items tied to the Kpando area. The agreement was announced at a heritage conference in Accra last week, and it follows the return of Asante royal regalia to the city of Kumasi two years ago. For Ghana, it is the homecoming of treasures that have been abroad for as long as a century and a half.
Finally, the art world is mourning a giant. Yaacov Agam, the Israeli artist who was one of the founding figures of kinetic art, the art of movement, has died at the age of 98. Agam built his career on works that shift and change as the viewer walks past them, turning the act of looking into something active rather than still. His pieces hang in major museums around the world, and he is widely regarded as one of the most important artists his country ever produced. He was 98.
That's it on Open Bid for today, Wednesday, June 24. Luxury Spending is also out today, with the trophy ceiling in handbags, watches, and jewelry, a boom in colored gemstones, and the return of a famous fair to Basel. And Closing Price follows this evening at 5 PM Eastern.
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I'm Sharon, from ALT/FNDATA. I'll talk with you in the next episode.
