Bonhams ended 2025 with $970 million in global sales, a headline number that, in another year, might have been received as unambiguously good news. Instead, it arrives trailing a thicket of context: a widely circulated Financial Times report on a £213 million pre-tax loss, a change in ownership, and renewed scrutiny of how auction houses account for downturns during a softening market.
Still, the topline result marks one of the strongest sales performances in Bonhams’s recent history, bolstered by growth across regions and categories and by an expansion strategy that, while echoing moves made by Sotheby’s and Christie’s, including an focus on private sales, diversified categories, and deeper digital engagement, differs in emphasis, with Bonhams anchoring itself in breadth and middle-market depth rather than trophy-dominated, evening sale model.
According to figures released by the house, Bonhams attracted buyers from 133 countries in 2025 and maintained operations in 24 markets worldwide. Sales were spread across more than 65 categories, with particularly strong results in fine art, luxury goods, and collector cars. The year’s top lot, a 2020 Bugatti Divo that sold for $9 million, was emblematic of the house’s increasing reliance on categories outside of trophy fine art.
Regionally, the picture was mixed but largely constructive. Bonhams Hong Kong posted its strongest year on record, reaching $104 million in auction and private sales, while UK sales rose 4.5 percent year over year to $285 million. In the US, Bonhams New York delivered its strongest 20th- and 21st-century Art Week to date, totaling $28.2 million in November. Private sales also played an increasingly significant role, particularly in the UK, where they rose roughly 50 percent compared with 2024.
Digital engagement, a metric Bonhams has emphasized more aggressively than some competitors, remained central to the business. Ninety-one percent of lots sold online by volume, with nearly half of total value (46 percent) transacted digitally, which shows not just of the house’s growing digital reach but increasing comfort among online buyers with lots beyond entry-level price points.
That said, the sales announcement lands in the shadow of the Financial Times’s January report that Bonhams’s pre-tax loss nearly doubled to £213 million in 2024. The figure, striking at first glance, was driven primarily by £153 million in impairment charges—an accounting write-down reflecting revised expectations about future cash flows rather than cash losses or operational collapse.
As ARTnews reported at the time, the impairment was taken against the equity value of Bonhams under its previous private-equity owner, Epiris, which sold the house in October to private credit firm Pemberton Asset Management. In other words, the loss reflected a reassessment of valuation amid a broader market slump, not a sudden hemorrhaging of revenue. Bonhams’s revenues fell 9 percent that year—hardly painless, but broadly in line with declines reported by Sotheby’s, Christie’s, and Phillips over the same period.
Julie Brener Davich, writing in her new Substack The Appraisal, focused on the accounting mechanics behind the headline loss, emphasizing the role of impairment charges rather than operational cash shortfalls—a distinction that complicates the more alarming read of the Financial Times’s otherwise accurate reporting (and one art-market readers should be familiar with). Impairments, she noted, often say more about past expectations than present performance, particularly in a cyclical market where valuations set during boom years are now being recalibrated.
Bonhams’s leadership has framed the moment as a reset under new ownership. In an October 2025 press release announcing the sale to Pemberton Asset Management and a new senior management team, the house introduced Seth Johnson as CEO, Liese Thomas as CFO, and Jennifer Babington as COO, while emphasizing strategic continuity.
“Despite a challenging market,” the statement said, Bonhams’s “resilient performance relative to the wider sector” had been supported by investments in technology, an expanded global footprint, and its positioning in the premium auction space alongside a strong foothold in the mid-market. The message was one of refinement rather than reinvention, with Bonhams leaning on a 60-plus-department structure designed to serve a broad and increasingly international collector base.
That strategy is perhaps most visibly embodied in Bonhams’s forthcoming US flagship at Steinway Hall, set to open next month. The 42,000-square-foot headquarters on West 57th Street consolidates the house’s New York operations into a single, public-facing cultural space—part salesroom, part exhibition venue, part statement of intent. It is an investment that signals confidence in the US market even as the broader auction sector works through a period of contraction. It also gives the house a New York headquarters to match the Big Three.
Taken together, Bonhams’s 2025 results show a house in transition, as it works to grow selectively and diversify smartly during a year when the art market offered little margin for error. Whether that proves enough in 2026 will depend less on headline totals than on consistency—something Bonhams seems intent on quietly rebuilding.
