Christie’s closed 2025 with $6.2 billion in projected global sales, up nearly seven percent from last year’s $5.8 billion and in line with its 2023 total.
After a sluggish first half, the house saw auction sales pick up considerable this fall, with deep bidding across the house’s core categories. Auction sales totaled $4.7 billion, up eight percent from last year, while private sales held flat at $1.5 billion.
The house also reported an 88 percent sell-through rate and a hammer-to-low-estimate ratio of 113 percent, both improvements on 2024. The year’s top lot—Mark Rothko’s No. 31 (Yellow Stripe) from the Ross Weis collection—fetched $62.1 million in New York on November 17.
Momentum was broad rather than spectacular. London posted its best Old Masters result in years with the sale of the Fabergé Winter Egg for £22.9 million ($30.2 million), while Hong Kong reset the regional Picasso record at $25.4 million. Christie’s two marquee single-owner collections of the year, the Riggio and Ross Weis sales, together brought in nearly $500 million. The firm also leaned heavily on its newly expanded automobiles business: Gooding Christie’s delivered $234 million in sales, its highest annual total to date.
The geographical picture, however, was uneven. The Americas, still Christie’s engine room, grew 15 percent to $2.58 billion, while EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa) rose only modestly. Asia-Pacific slipped 5 percent, a reminder that the region’s once-unquestioned growth trajectory is still recalibrating after years of erratic demand.
The headline growth masks a market still reliant on scarcity at the top and liquidity at the bottom—a healthier market, not a hotter one, according to analysts. Christie’s strength in luxury—up 17 percent and now the primary entry point for new buyers—suggests that the auction house is increasingly supported by consumption habits rather than just connoisseurship. The average online buyer now spends around $22,700, and 63 percent of new buyers make their first purchases digitally.
As ARTnews has reported elsewhere, luxury categories have quickly become both an on-ramp for buyers, and major revenue driver for the houses.
The generational turnover is real but not necessarily transformative. Millennials and Gen Z represented 46 percent of new bidders, up five percent from last year. Yet much of the year’s financial weight still came from traditional categories, like 20th/21st century art, Old Masters (up 24 percent), and the booming car trade. The picture is of a company broadening its base even as its profit centers remain comfortably old-world.
Strategically, Christie’s has tightened its pricing discipline, leaned into collection sales (still the most reliable driver of nine-figure totals), and bet heavily on automobiles as a growth segment with global appeal and less dependence on the taste hierarchies that govern art.
The weak spot remains Asia. After years of being cast as the inevitable center of gravity, the region’s contraction hints at a more diffused future in which spending from the Gulf states, India’s diaspora, and the US regains importance. Christie’s leans into this shift in the press release, flagging increasing engagement from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates—a trend that competitors, and the art fairs, are also chasing.
For all of Christie’s upbeat messaging, this year’s second half rebound was driven as much by pricing discipline, and several trophy consignments, as by renewed appetite. But Christie’s appears to be reasserting control over its core business via better estimates, more efficient sales structures, and a diversified revenue stream. The task for 2026 will be finding supply that justifies Christie’s optimism—rather than merely announcing it.
