Nathan Drahi, the 26-year-old son of Sotheby’s owner Patrick Drahi, will be put in charge of the day-to-day operations of the auction house in Asia as its managing director when Kevin Ching Sau-hong retires as the company’s long-time chief executive officer at the end of the year.
The announcement on Thursday marks a further changing of the guard at the 277-year-old auction house since Drahi senior, the French billionaire owner of European telecoms company Altice, acquired the publicly listed Sotheby’s for US$3.7 billion in 2019 and turned it into a private, family-owned business.
Soon after that, Sotheby’s president and global CEO Tad Smith was replaced by Charles Stewart, previously the chief financial officer of Altice USA.
The new management took over during a particularly challenging time for the industry. Global auctions sales fell 17 per cent year on year in 2019 and by 30 per cent in 2020, according to the Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report, as many physical sales were cancelled because of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The switch to virtual sales during the pandemic has added to a long list of fundamental shifts in the auctions industry in recent years, Ching says – among them the growing complexity of financing arrangements and the prominent role that big data plays in determining business strategies, as well as the lower average age of collectors, especially in Asia.
“I am more of a manager of the old world. Nathan is from a totally different world. Looking at where Sotheby’s is going and how he loves being in Asia, he should be the person to take the company forward,” Ching says.
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The Swiss-educated Nathan Drahi has been working in Sotheby’s Hong Kong office as commercial officer for the past year. Previously, he spent one year working at the London private equity firm BC Partners, and before then, he was in the London office of JP Morgan, the investment bank, for over two years.
Ching, a Hong Kong-born former lawyer, says the digitisation of the global auctions industry over the past couple of years means that a digital native like Nathan Drahi brings skills to the company that he, Asia CEO of Sotheby’s for 15 years, does not have.
Online sales in 2020 made up 70 per cent of all sales, up 30 per cent compared with 2019, Ching says. The pandemic was a catalyst to push out more digital offerings and the company has cut back on printing paper catalogues and introduced augmented reality technology and other virtual options for previews.
Ching, who was a renowned jade collector before he joined Sotheby’s, says he was fortunate to have witnessed the exponential growth of the Chinese market. However, he feels that someone with a finance background like Nathan Drahi is better suited to an industry which is selling objects that are increasingly seen as financial investments.
“When I joined 15 years ago, we were reminded not to link art and investment. Investment was almost an ugly word. Then, the world changed. As art became more expensive, a painting is not just art,” he says.
“When someone is spending US$20 million to US$30 million, say, on a piece of art, it would be silly not to ask if it’d make good investment. So to sell a painting, you can no longer just rely on the expertise of your specialists. I’m leaving at the right time. Now it’s about deals.”
Ching will continue as a chairman emeritus at Sotheby’s and continue to “mentor” Drahi.
Ching’s daughter Nicole Ching Teen-yee recently joined Sotheby’s London office at the start of 2021 to work on business development and client strategy.
