A rather long read in the Financial Times: https://www.ft.com/content/a7cbc3b7-f3b3-445c-bf64-51cedd5e9a29

Some of the story is familiar, but it's interesting to see that the case in the Chicago area is still pending.

 

Don’t have access…

 

Oops - sorry. I'm not a subscriber to the site, but the article came up in my news feed in full text. If you Google "Rolex" and hit the news tab, it may come up for you. Worth a look if you have time.

 

It's interesting (but no coincidence) that the Financial Times waited until the bubble has burst to publish the story of a Rolex AD's employee buying watches under fake names and reselling them on the secondary market. It's been happening everywhere for four years and everybody knows about it.

 

Nothing new since 10 years many AD done it

 

I read this article last week and having done very little research just over a year ago, I quickly came to the conclusion that this was happening on a large scale.

Lots of videos and forum boards online regarding it happening without concrete evidence. I don’t like to assume but when I was reading that these new watches could sell for 50-100% premium on the grey market, unfortunately I can’t help but think there will be enough individuals that will exploit their positions for monetary gain.

 

Grey market is not the flipper market 2 different things.

 

100%...
The Crown has infinitely deep pockets, this will disappear.
After all, in a world where folks are starving to death this is news that 99% of the earth's population cannot even begin to fathom nor give a rat's ass about.

Now if this was a supermarket chain or natural gas or crude oil thing... well.

 

Is this aimed at my comment?

I was trying to point out that the huge premiums that these new Rolex models go for on the grey market will result in individuals who have direct access to new Rolex’s (sales people / managers of AD’s, etc) to sell these Rolex’s to the grey market dealers for a premium over MSRP. The grey market dealers will then add on a further sum to cover their overhead and profit to sell to their retail customers.

Or have I misunderstood what’s going on?

 

Grey Market is not the flipper market, you are confusing terms.

The Grey market is watches sold with no warranty. These watches are on the market as dealers are given a yearly allotment of watches and sometimes they cannot sell them all, then they sell them to the grey market dealers at a large discount as this is the only way to dump these watches., this is against their dealer agreements. These watches sell at discount and have no warranty.

Rolex started constraining production about 8 years ago to stop this, and they succeeded, creating a different problem for them.

The flipper market is another beast, this is people that buy expressly to resell the watches over MSRP, sometimes this involves sales people. This happens when production is constrained below market demand, and happens on some models.

These are 2 totally different terms.

 

.

 

I know some guys that said that the moonwatch with calibre 1861 was the last one certified by nasa and it was la crème de la crème, without considering 321, 861 and underestimated the coaxial scapement and metas. Later, they sold them without losing money. Nowadays they post blatantly their 3861. See to believe it.

We could talk about the rolex marketing another day.

 

My favorite quote from the article:

“The scarcity of our products is not a strategy on our part,” Rolex says.

Perhaps not, but it’s hard to believe that Rolex isn’t well aware of the number of its watches that are disappearing out the back doors of ADs and reappearing on the websites of grey market sellers at a significant premium. It’s also hard to believe that Rolex has done much to stop that practice.

 

Thank you for the clarification, what would something like Chrono24 be considered then, a grey market dealer or a flipper?

 

Neither. They are a sales platform like eBay except that they specialize in watches.

 

You can read the article here: https://archive.vn/cnTOV. I didn't find anything new in the article other than more details about CD Peacock (but it's not informative about the market, just murky allegations about a jewelry store employee dispute). The illustrations are a nice conceit.

 

Oh okay, so they can have both private sellers or businesses selling on their platform and they take a selling fee?

What is a good example of a grey market dealer?

 

Jomashop

 

Bull!

Rolex admit it started this a few years back to stop the Rolex Grey Market.

then went silent…