【美国电台节目】都是哪些人在买几十万的表？

As COVID was shutting theworld down, the luxury watch industry was having a renaissance. Oliver Mulleris a watch industry analyst.

OLIVER MULLER: In the 25years I have been in the watch industry, we have never experienced such astrong growth - never, ever.

VANEK SMITH: Luxury watcheshad been a shrinking market, mostly catering to older, wealthy collectors,connoisseur types. But in the early part of the pandemic, as millions of peoplewere losing their jobs, another group was coming into enormous wealth.

MULLER: People, mainlyyounger people, made so much money so easily with cryptocurrencies. And theystarted to buy watches. And that's where the market really took off.

VANEK SMITH: Took off andimmediately hit a ceiling. Luxury watchmaking is slow. Each watch has hundredsof parts sourced from different makers, assembled by hand. The little artisanalindustry was overwhelmed. It could not meet the moment.

MULLER: We had waiting listsof five, six, seven, 12 years.

VANEK SMITH: But instead ofdiscouraging would-be watch buyers, those waiting lists drove them into afrenzy.

MULLER: Rich people, if youtell them that they can't get something, they are ready to pay any price to getit.

VANEK SMITH: This created abooming secondary market, where speculators would snap up watches as fast asthey could and flip them for double, triple, 10 times the price. Luxury watcheswere no longer a niche product for super-wealthy collectors. They were aninvestment. And then something happened that would have destroyed mostindustries, crypto crashed. The markets crashed. The demand for luxury watchescratered overnight. But the same thing that held the industry back fromexpanding with the explosive new demand saved it. Because of the slowproduction, the market hadn't been flooded with luxury watches that suddenlynobody wanted to buy. When the crypto buyers went away, mostly the waiting listjust got shorter, says Muller.

MULLER: Watches havedemonstrated that they are quite resilient.

YADIGAROGLOU: A mechanical watch is, like ourwatchmaker was saying, like a little heartbeat. There are gears moving. There'sa spring that provides power. It's analog. And this is something which I feel ahuman being needs to compensate all this super high-tech stuff we have aroundus.

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