Bonhams ended 2025 with $970 million in world gross sales, a headline quantity that, in one other 12 months, may need been acquired as unambiguously excellent news. As an alternative, it arrives trailing a thicket of context: a broadly circulated Monetary Occasions report on a £213 million pre-tax loss, a change in possession, and renewed scrutiny of how public sale homes account for downturns throughout a softening market.
Nonetheless, the topline end result marks one of many strongest gross sales performances in Bonhams’s latest historical past, bolstered by progress throughout areas and classes and by an growth technique that, whereas echoing strikes made by Sotheby’s and Christie’s, together with an concentrate on non-public gross sales, diversified classes, and deeper digital engagement, differs in emphasis, with Bonhams anchoring itself in breadth and middle-market depth slightly than trophy-dominated, night sale mannequin.
In line with figures launched by the home, Bonhams attracted patrons from 133 international locations in 2025 and maintained operations in 24 markets worldwide. Gross sales have been unfold throughout greater than 65 classes, with notably sturdy ends in high quality artwork, luxurious items, and collector automobiles. The 12 months’s prime lot, a 2020 Bugatti Divo that offered for $9 million, was emblematic of the home’s growing reliance on classes outdoors of trophy high quality artwork.
Regionally, the image was combined however largely constructive. Bonhams Hong Kong posted its strongest 12 months on document, reaching $104 million in public sale and personal gross sales, whereas UK gross sales rose 4.5 % 12 months over 12 months to $285 million. Within the US, Bonhams New York delivered its strongest Twentieth- and Twenty first-century Artwork Week so far, totaling $28.2 million in November. Non-public gross sales additionally performed an more and more important position, notably within the UK, the place they rose roughly 50 % in contrast with 2024.
Digital engagement, a metric Bonhams has emphasised extra aggressively than some rivals, remained central to the enterprise. Ninety-one % of tons offered on-line by quantity, with practically half of complete worth (46 %) transacted digitally, which reveals not simply of the home’s rising digital attain however growing consolation amongst on-line patrons with tons past entry-level value factors.
That mentioned, the gross sales announcement lands within the shadow of the Monetary Occasions’s January report that Bonhams’s pre-tax loss practically doubled to £213 million in 2024. The determine, hanging at first look, was pushed primarily by £153 million in impairment fees—an accounting write-down reflecting revised expectations about future money flows slightly than money losses or operational collapse.
As ARTnews reported on the time, the impairment was taken in opposition to the fairness worth of Bonhams below its earlier private-equity proprietor, Epiris, which offered the home in October to personal credit score agency Pemberton Asset Administration. In different phrases, the loss mirrored a reassessment of valuation amid a broader market droop, not a sudden hemorrhaging of income. Bonhams’s revenues fell 9 % that 12 months—hardly painless, however broadly in keeping with declines reported by Sotheby’s, Christie’s, and Phillips over the identical interval.
Julie Brener Davich, writing in her new Substack The Appraisal, centered on the accounting mechanics behind the headline loss, emphasizing the position of impairment fees slightly than operational money shortfalls—a distinction that complicates the extra alarming learn of the Monetary Occasions’s in any other case correct reporting (and one art-market readers ought to be acquainted with). Impairments, she famous, usually say extra about previous expectations than current efficiency, notably in a cyclical market the place valuations set throughout increase years are actually being recalibrated.
Bonhams’s management has framed the second as a reset below new possession. In an October 2025 press launch asserting the sale to Pemberton Asset Administration and a brand new senior administration workforce, the home launched Seth Johnson as CEO, Liese Thomas as CFO, and Jennifer Babington as COO, whereas emphasizing strategic continuity.
“Regardless of a difficult market,” the assertion mentioned, Bonhams’s “resilient efficiency relative to the broader sector” had been supported by investments in expertise, an expanded world footprint, and its positioning within the premium public sale area alongside a robust foothold within the mid-market. The message was certainly one of refinement slightly than reinvention, with Bonhams leaning on a 60-plus-department construction designed to serve a broad and more and more worldwide collector base.
That technique is probably most visibly embodied in Bonhams’s forthcoming US flagship at Steinway Corridor, set to open subsequent month. The 42,000-square-foot headquarters on West 57th Road consolidates the home’s New York operations right into a single, public-facing cultural area—half salesroom, half exhibition venue, half assertion of intent. It’s an funding that alerts confidence within the US market even because the broader public sale sector works by a interval of contraction. It additionally provides the home a New York headquarters to match the Huge Three.
Taken collectively, Bonhams’s 2025 outcomes present a home in transition, as it really works to develop selectively and diversify neatly throughout a 12 months when the artwork market supplied little margin for error. Whether or not that proves sufficient in 2026 will rely much less on headline totals than on consistency—one thing Bonhams appears intent on quietly rebuilding.
