This week Phillips reported total auction sales for the first half of 2026 at $507m, up 60% on spring 2025. Its sell-through rate was 90% by lot, with 40% of buyers purchasing at Phillips for the first time this year, and nearly a third being Millennial and Gen Z collectors. Nearly 70% of lots were sold online.
A couple of big collections have boosted Phillips’ art sales figures: the sale of the US diplomat John L. Loeb’s collection of Danish art, which made $18m across five auctions in New York and London, and items from the estate of the American journalist and art collector Tina Hills, led by Joan Mitchell’s Plain (1989), sold for $6.8m in New York in May.
Martin Wilson, who took on the role of chief executive at Phillips a year ago, tells The Art Newspaper: “The broader change in the market plays a part, but for us [sales growth] has a lot to do with very conscious strategic choices that we made about the areas that we can lead in.” He continues: “If you offer things of quality, you will always find buyers—the Loeb collection was a perfect example of offering something which is absolutely right for the market and in a way that’s really attractive. It’s not an accident, it’s really disciplined focus on what we’re trying to achieve.”
The auction house’s top lot of the year so far is Andy Warhol’s Sixteen Jackies (1964), which sold for $16.2m (all prices include fees) in New York in May, followed by an F.P. Journe Chronomètre à Résonance “Souscription, No. 007” (around 2000) for $13.9m in New York in June.
In a sign of changing times, three of the five top lots sold so far this year at Phillips are watches, reflective of the rapid rise in watch sales at the auction house, which are held in association with Bacs & Russo and have totalled $235m so far this year, compared to $115m in 2025. That is more than the firm’s sales total for Modern and contemporary art, which so far stand at $224m (up from $149m in 2025).
The strength in watch sales is, Wilson says, the result of a decade-long project to foster a community of collectors “which is very online and very connected, which I think is why the market has grown so fast.” Many of these collectors will buy in other sales categories too, Wilson says: “You have to assume that people today, particularly the younger generation, are really curious about all categories…Everyone talks about this great wealth transfer, but I think it’s more of a great taste transfer…the younger generations see the world differently, what they collect is much more connected with their values.”
Nearly 60% of buyers on Phillips’ Dropshop digital platform—which was launched in 2023 and releases new “drops” of works by contemporary artists—this year have been Millennial and Gen Z, 70% of them new to Phillips, the auction house says.
When Wilson became chief executive a year ago, he was intent on innovating, “but innovation is meaningless unless it actually does something which makes the experience of buying and selling better,” he says. One such innovation is priority bidding, introduced last autumn, an experiment wherein buyers could submit a non-retractable bid before the sale in exchange for a reduced buyer’s premium rate. The response was enormous, Wilson says: “We’ve now got three times as many buying bids before a sale than we had a year ago, 300% growth. Our sales are now routinely 40% to 50% sold before the auctioneer even takes his place in the rostrum, and that’s really meaningful for sellers.”
As a privately-owned company, Phillips (like Sotheby’s and Christie’s) does not have to disclose profit, although the latest filings with Companies House for Phillips Assets Ltd—the UK holding company that owns Phillips Auctioneers LLC (Phillips LLC) and Phillips Auctioneers Ltd—report that the group’s overall losses improved from £45m in 2023 to £8.7m in 2024.
