Editor’s Note
This article details the arrest of a former executive from luxury watch-sharing platform Tokematch on fraud allegations. It examines how the pandemic-era trend of viewing watches as investment assets intersected with the platform’s rapid growth, raising questions about oversight in emerging asset-sharing services.
The former representative of the company operating the luxury watch sharing service “Tokematch” was arrested on the 26th on suspicion of fraud by the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department. During the COVID-19 pandemic, watches came to be viewed as “assets,” and since the service’s launch in January 2021, it is said to have taken custody of over 1,700 watches. This article explores the circumstances and background behind the service’s sudden termination in January 2024, along with industry trends.
The COVID-19 pandemic, which began in 2020, wiped out “experience-based consumption” like travel worldwide. At that time, people’s money collectively flowed towards luxury watches, in addition to precious metals and jewelry.
Popular watch brands, to avoid brand devaluation from resale, made it so that popular models were no longer available on store shelves at authorized dealers, creating a situation where purchasing became difficult for anyone other than traditional customers.
For example, take the Rolex “Cosmograph Daytona,” one of the most famous luxury watches, whose secondary market price has consistently exceeded its retail price for over a decade. According to data from the global watch sales specialist site “Chrono24,” a stainless steel model released in 2016 had a retail price of just under 1.3 million yen at the time, but was trading for about 3 million yen by November of the same year.
By the time the Tokematch service launched in January 2021, this had risen to nearly 4.4 million yen, and at its peak in March 2022, it skyrocketed to over 8.3 million yen.
“Tokematch” was a service that attracted borrowers based on this “aspiration,” while taking custody of watches from owners who viewed them as “assets” and renting them out. Its pitch was that owners could retain the potential for future capital gains while also earning a yield from lending.
Journalist Yasuhito Shibuya focused on the fact that the deposit fee paid to lenders was high compared to the rental fee paid by borrowers. According to him, in “Tokematch,” renting a watch valued at 1.5 million yen or less required about 40,000 yen per month, while the lender would receive about 20,000 yen per month.