The Breitling Watch Source Forums

Can anyone shed any light on this? My wife purchased an Aerospace for my 40th in 2003. She paid £1260 for it - the full list price for an Aerospace with a rubber divers strap. The same watch now has a list price of around £3000. Has anyone any ideas on why the list prices on these watches have gone up so much? Don't get me wrong I love this watch to bits but to double in price seems a bit of a tall order - what do you think?

Prices have increased because they can get away with it, simple as that. It's not just Breitling, virtually all of hte Swiss firms have done the same and sales continue to surge so prices will continue to go up.

I think it is something people have generally commented on here; my personal example is the Chronomat I bought in 1999, steel/18K version with Pilot steel/18K and pearl dial. It was £2,600 then, today the same watch (although granted it has a different movement) is over £10,000.

Of course you have to take inflation into account, but even so, if the prices had gone up by a reasonable amount, it should today be around £5,000. So, in other words it has more than doubled in real terms, which is too much really; £10k for that watch is actually bordering on the preposterous to be honest really.

Another way of looking at it, in 1999 for the money my watch cost me, I could not have bought the cheapest car on sale brand new at that time. Today, the watch costs the same as a good family four door saloon.

Well, good luck to Breitling, the problem is though because they have priced themselves in the way they have; granted the other makers have done the same, but I am looking for a solid gold watch, and I am not even considering a new watch, I don't think they are worth it at all; I am looking on the second hand market, there you can find some good watches priced sensibly.

That's not really an apples-to-apples comparison. The current Chronomat isn't the same watch now as it was in 1999. The two-tone MOP Evo increased in price by roughly 50% from the time it was introduced to now. If we apply that same increase to the older-gen Chronomat's price the year it was discontinued (the year the Evo was introduced) that would bring its current retail price to approximately $7800 US - still a pretty hefty increase, although not on a par with £10k. If the price increase were in line with inflation, then it should cost around $6300, although that doesn't take the price of gold into account, which has increased substantially in the last year or so. That said, the rate of increase on non-gold models is only slightly better: an all-steel Evo on Pilot sold for $4500 in 2005, the year it came out. Today, retail is $6500, or an increase of 44%. If it were in line with inflation, it should cost $5300.

For the past 10 years, look at the cost of precious metals, demand from china, and the weak dollar vs strong euro, and there you find your answer.