Are Speedmasters going back to the moon?
After periods of sharp declines, some Speedmasters have been posting attractive returns in recent months, while others have never stopped growing.
After the huge success that the MoonSwatch has gained, Swatch has decided to revive a similar collaboration with Blancpain, in this case reworking the Fifty-Fathoms.
The idea of revisiting some of the group's most iconic watches seems to be becoming an established marketing strategy. This new collaboration marks an attempt to reposition a brand, and more specifically a model, that despite having a great history, in recent years has never been the center of attention as the Speedmaster has been.
The MoonSwatch operation has brought numerous benefits, first of all the fact that more than 1 million of these watches have been sold. Secondly it has increased the "brand awareness" of the Speedmaster even more. With this new collaboration the group will try to achieve the same goals, especially that of putting the Fifty Fathoms back in the spotlight.
Returning to Speedmasters, we said that brand awareness has increased, but from what can we see it? Obviously by the prices in the secondary market, where so many Speedmasters started to rise in the last period.
The MoonSwatches were introduced in 2022, at the exact time when the market was beginning the slump period. Therefore the impact of this event on the Speedmaster market was negated by that dump phase. Now that the market in recent months has stabilized, we have noticed that many references are registering positive values.
Of the many models and special editions, we have selected a few particularly interesting ones to understand how the market for this collection is moving.
Starting by analyzing the Snoopys, it can be seen that in the last three months all of these references have experienced interesting percentages of growth.
As the image below shows, the lowest percentage is that of the 50th anniversary. This models had grown so much shortly after its launch, but once the hype waned, the price dropped a lot until 3 months ago where there was a rebound in the price back into the positive.
The other two models, on the other hand, have more consistent percentages and if we broaden the analysis to the last 6 months both show a 9% return.
All three of these watches have reversed their trend in the 6-3 months, in fact if we analyze the price compared to last year we get extremely negative data with prices falling between -25%, of the 50th anniversary, and -11% of the Snoopy Apollo.
As we had mentioned earlier, the performance of the Speedmasters is not very correlated and a clear example is in the graph below where the Apollo 11 50th Anniversary still has a declining price while the other two are growing.
Specifically, the rose gold model after a very strong growth recorded shortly after its launch has stabilized and has been growing at rates around 2-3% both over the past year, the past six months, and the past three.
More volatile, on the other hand, was the value of the 50th anniversary, which had slowed down in price, with a rebound occurring around July 2023, but which was then followed by a further drop.
In contrast, the Ed White has risen the most in the past three months.
As with the previous models, these also have very positive market prices if we broaden the analysis to the last 3 years with prices with growth rates between 29% and 39%.
From the data analyzed we can conclude that these Speedmasters in addition to having grown a great deal in the last three years, as indeed have so many other modern watches, are among the first to emerge from the negative phase that began in mid-2022, and great credit for this can be given to the collaboration with Swatch.
In addition to the models previously analyzed, we have selected other Speedmasters with very high returns. The first among them is the Split-Seconds.
We started collecting data on this model only in the last year, but this still allows us to observe the great growth that this model has generated from July 2023 onward. This curve has become steeper and steeper, in fact in the last three months this model has made +48.78%.
Moving on to analyze two other references, this time with lower prices, we notice even higher growth percentages.
As the image below shows, Speedy Tuesday has grown at some of the highest percentages, although in the last three months it has lost -6%.
Dark Side Of The Moon on the other hand has had a return over the past 3 years of +30%, somewhat lower than Speedy, but in the past 3 months instead it has grown by 1%, while in the past 6 months by about 4.31%.
Speedmasters have always been attractive watches to the market, as evidenced by the very high increases in 3-year reviews.
However, at this stage of the market it seems that this collection has an edge with most of the models having rebounded and returned to growth.
It is still too early to say whether this is stable growth or not, plus we are a long way from the rises we had seen in previous years.
What can be said for now is that this data is very interesting is it signals an increase in market attention to Speedmasters. Time will tell if Speedmasters are destined to return to the moon, although in this case we are talking about the market and not the stars.
