Welcome to the Business of Watches, the Houdiniqi podcast, where Herology meets high finance,

and we go behind the scenes to talk to the executives driving the global watch industry.

This week, in Geneva, we sit down with Akio Naito, the president of Seiko Watch Corporation.

We talk about Seiko's ultra-high-end brand CREDIOR, its international launch,

and its debut at Watches and Wonders. But first, I'm joined by my colleague, Senior Haudinky

editor Mark Kozlerich, to talk about the spring auction sales that are actually still going on

here in Geneva. Mark, thanks for joining us.

Great to speak with you. How are you? I'm great. Thanks for having me. It's an exciting

auction season, so I'm excited to be here and chat about it. Great. Yeah, no, it's been quite

interesting. I was at some of the auctions on the weekend. And yeah, some really compelling results.

I mean, I think certainly we can say things are strong. Yeah, what's standing out for you so far? I mean, you know, just to be clear, we're on Monday here, Monday evening in Geneva. And so Christy's just wrapped up its first day. We've had Phillips, we've had Antiquorum, and we had Sotheby's on Sunday. But yeah,

tell me what's standing out for you, Mark? Yeah, I think we're seeing a pretty significant market

shift, which frankly started a little while ago and it's slowly been ramping up. But I think back to

the sort of neo-vintage sale that happened a couple

years ago at Phillips and the interest in things like the Derek Pratt, Urban Yergensen, Oval

pocket watch, and that was a massive result. And I started to pay attention. There were more

and more really strange, rare pocket watches coming to market, which is, you know, everybody says

I have this pocket watch agenda, but I was watching the market shift there. And then the Indies,

the FPJourn shift, we're seeing a little bit of fall off from four-digit Rolex, which used to be

a blue chip. And so there is, I think, a massive market shift with

some truly incredible results, stuff that's hard to understand. But I'm curious to see how long

this lasts. I actually do think that this is going to be a long-term shift in what we're seeing

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