From the
Times.co.uk
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The week in which it emerged that Britain is the last big world economy to be stuck in recession is not, on the face of it, the best time to announce that you are about to go into production with a luxury car costing £220,000.
But that is exactly what Bentley did yesterday, telling the world that it is going to start making the Mulsanne next spring at the company’s headquarters in Crewe, with deliveries to customers starting in the summer.
And it expects people to buy it. “The initial demand is very strong,” said Stuart McCullough, Bentley’s board member for sales and marketing. “The rate at which orders are building leads us to believe that by February it will be sold all the way to 2011.”
In other words, the recession may be V-shaped or W-shaped, almost over or still going strong, but the super-rich are still, well, very rich; and for many of them, the economic downturn has turned out to be far less of a calamity than some feared.
Demand may be down on a couple of years ago, but it is picking up again.
“People have been cautious about spending very large sums of money on a visible thing like a car,” Mr McCullough said. “But that is easing now that people are starting to see what the outlook for the next 18 months is like.”
It is not just Bentleys, either: they are also buying houses, art, jewellery and mega-yachts. The 289ft Maltese Falcon, the largest private yacht in the world (it even has its own private submarine) was sold this autumn for a reported $120 million (£72 million) to a hedge fund manager, Elena Ambrosiadou, who divides her time between Cyprus, Greece and London.
“In the first half of 2009 there was a big slowdown in the yacht sector,” said Jamie Edmiston, of the yacht brokers Edmiston & Co.
“But in the last quarter there has been definite activity in both charters and sales. There are a good number of transactions taking place, anywhere between €10 million [£9 million] and €100 million, though possibly not as many as were happening a couple of years ago.”
Jonathan Hewlett, head of Savills London region, which recently sold a London house that was on the market for £40 million, said there had been a significant rise in the sale of £10 million-plus properties in the capital.
“People who have made their money over a long period, and have still got it, are comfortable to spend it if the house is right.
“They are not going to be as frivolous as they were 18 months ago, but I would hope that everybody is feeling a bit like that.”
The art market is also looking up: at the top end, according to Christie’s, apart from a dip at the end of last year, it never went away. “There was real unclarity then,” the auction house’s Matthew Paton said.
“No one had any perspective on where they stood financially.” Since then, he said, there had been a steady growth in confidence. “We are very lucky in the art market — we are appealing very directly to passion, to the heart not the head.”
Next week Christie’s is holding its most valuable sale of Old Masters ever; it includes a Rembrandt with an estimate of £18 million to £25 million, and a Raphael drawing that is hoped to sell for £12 million to £16 million. Earlier this week, in Hong Kong, a rare 5-carat pink diamond sold for $10.8 million, setting a record price of $2.2 million per carat. “No stone has ever been sold for $2 million a carat, we were used to ... a million dollars a carat for coloured diamonds but never two million,” said François Curiel, Christie’s Europe chairman. “This is an absolute record that is not going to be broken for a while, I believe.”
At Asprey in London, a £55,000 handmade jewelled child’s rocking dragon of silver gilt and lacquer sold within three days.
Marc Cohen, a director of Ledbury Research, which looks into individuals with high net worth, said that in percentage terms the super-wealthy had experienced greater losses during the recession than the rest of the population.
“But if you’ve got a few hundred million, and have lost a sizeable chunk, then you have still got a few hundred million.”
Many chose to put their spending on hold during the worst of the downturn, he said; now many are starting to spend again. “London property is starting to accelerate, and we’ve started to see art sales go up quite quickly. But it is not a return to the euphoria of 2006 and 2007. It is a stabilisation. We are not back on track for another boom.”
