Article: Why Dubai Became a Global Hub for Luxury Watches
Why Dubai Became a Global Hub for Luxury Watches
Dubai didn't become a global luxury watch hub because of any one thing. Its position built up over decades from a combination of factors: a long-standing trading culture, early relationships with the Swiss watch brands, a location between Europe and Asia, international tourism, fast-growing private wealth and an increasingly knowledgeable collector community.
The result is a watch market where authorised retailers, brand boutiques, collectors, independent dealers and a busy pre-owned trade all operate side by side. We've been part of that market for more than eight years from our boutique in Dubai Marina, and in this article we explain how each of those factors helped put the city where it is today.
One of the earliest pieces of the story began in the Bur Dubai souk. In 1950, when Dubai was still a small port living off fishing, pearling and trade, Ahmed Seddiqi opened a watch counter there. By 1952 he was selling Rolex, and a lot of what came afterwards was built on relationships that started at that counter.
How Dubai's luxury watch market developed
- 1950 Ahmed Seddiqi & Sons opens in the Bur Dubai souk
- 1952 Seddiqi becomes the first Rolex retailer in the UAE
- 1960 Patek Philippe arrives, also through Seddiqi
- 1964 Swiss Watch Services is set up to look after servicing
- 1985 Jebel Ali Free Zone opens, the first free zone in the UAE
- 2005 A Rolex boutique opens at Mall of the Emirates
- 2008 The Dubai Mall opens
- 2015 The first Dubai Watch Week
- 2018 VAT arrives at 5%, with a tax refund scheme for tourists. The world's largest Rolex boutique opens at The Dubai Mall
- 2020s Record tourism, record millionaire inflows, and pre-owned goes mainstream, with Rolex Certified Pre-Owned arriving in Dubai
The Seddiqi groundwork
We'd argue this is the most underrated part of the story. The big Swiss houses are fussy about who sells their watches, and they won't commit to a market without proper servicing behind it. Seddiqi had both in place decades before Dubai became rich or famous. When the money and the visitors finally arrived, Rolex, Patek Philippe and the rest already had a partner they trusted.
That relationship has grown with the city. Seddiqi went on to represent Audemars Piguet, Hublot, TAG Heuer, Chopard and many others, and in 2018 opened what's still the largest Rolex boutique in the world: three floors and 850 square metres at The Dubai Mall.
Dubai was a trading city first
Long before the hotels, Dubai earned its living on the Creek, with dhows carrying goods between the Gulf, Iran and the Indian subcontinent and a gold souk in Deira that's still busy today. Jebel Ali Free Zone opened in 1985 and turned re-exporting into a national strategy.
Moving small, expensive things across borders quickly and discreetly is what Dubai's merchants have always done. Watches simply fitted in.
Dubai's location between Europe and Asia
For our side of the business, this is the reason that matters most. London is about seven hours away and Mumbai about three. Dubai International handled 95.2 million passengers in 2025, more international traffic than any other airport, with direct flights to 291 destinations in 110 countries.
The pre-owned watch market is global. A Daytona's value is set by what it sells for in London, Hong Kong, Geneva and New York all at once, and Dubai's time zone lets a dealer here talk to Asia in the morning and Europe in the afternoon. Being in the middle of those flows is a real advantage.
The UK connection runs especially deep. The UK was the airport's third-biggest country market last year, with 6.3 million passengers, and London was its busiest route. Plenty of watches travel that route too, as we explained in How the UK Pre-Owned Watch Market Fuels Dubai's Luxury Collections.
Luxury tourism and the Dubai Mall effect
Dubai had 19.59 million international overnight visitors in 2025, a record for the third year running. People come here partly to shop, and they plan for it. The Dubai Mall alone had 111 million visitors in 2024.
A watch is close to the perfect holiday purchase: small, easy to carry home, and far more likely to hold its value than most things you'd buy abroad. The tax system helps too. VAT has been 5% since 2018, and eligible tourists can claim it back before they fly. Our guide to buying luxury watches in Dubai as a tourist covers how that works.
Wealthy residents gave the market depth
Tourists bring volume. Residents are what turned Dubai into a proper collectors' market.
No personal income tax, long-term golden visas and a very comfortable way of life have pulled wealthy families and entrepreneurs here for years. Henley & Partners forecast a net inflow of 9,800 millionaires into the UAE in 2025, more than any other country, and counted around 120 family offices in DIFC.
People who live here collect differently from people passing through. They wear their watches, trade up, sell pieces on and consign others, and that constant movement is what a secondary market runs on.
"When I started Bramleys, most of the people coming through the door were tourists looking for a souvenir with a crown on it. These days it's much more likely to be someone who lives here and wants to sell one watch to fund the next. That's when I knew Dubai had become a real collectors' city." Dean Bramley, founder
Gulf buyers and the Swiss watch brands
The official figures show how much the Swiss now depend on this region. Exports to the UAE were worth around CHF 1.3 billion in 2025 and grew 3.5%, in a year when shipments to China fell 12.1%. Add the rest of the GCC and the total comes to about CHF 2.21 billion, which would make the Gulf the second-biggest market in the world if it were counted as one.
Dubai is also the showroom for the whole region. A lot of our clients live in Riyadh, Doha, Kuwait City or Muscat and treat a weekend here as a chance to see far more in person than they can at home.
2026 has tested this. The regional conflict earlier this year knocked confidence across the Gulf, and Swiss exports to Saudi Arabia and Qatar both fell in the first quarter. The UAE held up better than many expected, with exports up 1.6% in the first half. One honest caveat: export figures count what the brands ship, not what customers buy, and some analysts think sell-through in the region has been softer than those numbers suggest. From where we sit, the long-term case for Dubai hasn't changed.
Dubai Watch Week and the events calendar
Dubai was on the watch industry's radar before it had a fair of its own. The Grand Prix d'Horlogerie de Genève was already stopping in DIFC with its travelling exhibition in 2013, hosted with Seddiqi. Then in 2015 Seddiqi launched Dubai Watch Week alongside the GPHG, and that changed things.
It's held every two years, it's free, and nothing is sold on site, which is unusual for a watch fair. The 2025 edition filled Burj Park at the foot of the Burj Khalifa with more than 90 brands, and Rolex chief executive Jean-Frédéric Dufour appeared on stage, which he rarely does anywhere.
Honestly, it's the best thing that's happened to collectors here. Visitors fly in for it, residents come to us afterwards wanting to talk about something they handled at the fair, and the average buyer in Dubai knows a lot more than they did ten years ago. That's good for every dealer who does things properly.
New and pre-owned: two markets that feed each other
The authorised dealers in Dubai are some of the best anywhere, but they can't get round the problem every city has. The steel sports models everyone wants from Rolex, Patek Philippe and Audemars Piguet are allocated, and waiting lists are part of life. That's the gap pre-owned fills: watches you can take home today, references the brands have discontinued, and several years, dials and conditions to compare side by side.
The two channels need each other more than either tends to admit.
A serious pre-owned market needs more than people wanting second-hand watches. It needs a big enough base of new-watch sales to supply it, collectors who are happy to move between references, proper servicing and authentication expertise, and enough buyers and sellers to keep watches circulating. Dubai now has all of those.
In practice, a watch's life here often looks like this. Someone buys it new from an authorised retailer and wears it for a few years. Then they trade it towards another reference, or sell or consign it, and before long the same watch is in front of another collector. New and pre-owned aren't really separate markets in Dubai. They're two stages in the life of the same watches, which is why the city's pre-owned trade grew up alongside its luxury retail scene rather than apart from it.
Even the traditional retailers have moved in. Seddiqi opened a pre-owned boutique with WatchBox, and Rolex's Certified Pre-Owned programme now has its own salon inside Seddiqi's Rolex boutique at Wafi Mall. Secondary prices also recovered in 2025, rising 4.9% globally according to WatchCharts and Morgan Stanley after two years of falls.
For an independent like us, the job is simple to describe and hard to do well: make buyers confident. Every watch and handbag we sell is authenticated, checked against its serial numbers and graded honestly before it goes in the cabinet. The range is part of what makes Dubai different. Over a few weeks this year we've had a 2016 Tudor Black Bay Bronze sitting a few feet from a Richard Mille RM 65-01, with a Daytona "Ghost", an A. Lange & Söhne Datograph Perpetual and Hermès Kelly and Lindy bags in between. You can see what's in stock now in our pre-owned watches and Rolex collections.
Where Dubai's luxury watch ecosystem is concentrated
The market isn't in one place. Different parts of the city play different roles, and following them roughly in the order they developed tells you a lot about how the market grew.
Deira and Bur Dubai
This is where it started. The souks on both sides of Dubai Creek were the city's commercial heart for generations, with traders moving gold, textiles and spices between the Gulf, Iran and India. Seddiqi's first watch counter opened in the Bur Dubai souk in 1950, and the gold souk in Deira is still one of the busiest precious-metals markets in the region. The merchant habits formed here, such as fast deals, personal relationships and handling valuable goods across borders, still shape how watches are bought and sold in Dubai today.
Downtown Dubai and The Dubai Mall
If the souks are where Dubai's watch trade began, Downtown is where it went global. The Dubai Mall has more than 1,200 stores and had 111 million visitors in 2024, and its luxury wing is where the major Swiss brands and authorised retailers concentrate their flagship boutiques. The world's largest Rolex boutique is here. This is brand-led retail at huge scale, driven heavily by tourists, and for most visitors it's their first sight of the full current collections.
DIFC
The Dubai International Financial Centre plays a quieter but important role. It's home to banks, wealth managers and around 120 family offices, which puts a lot of Dubai's serious collectors within a short walk of each other. It's also become a venue for the culture around watches. The Grand Prix d'Horlogerie de Genève's travelling exhibition stopped at a DIFC gallery in 2013, and it came back to Gate Village for Dubai Watch Week in 2016. The audience here tends to know exactly what it's looking for.
Dubai Marina
Dubai Marina is different again. It's a mix of apartments, hotels and waterfront restaurants, so the person walking past is as likely to live round the corner as to be staying for a week. That's one reason we chose the Marina, and the InterContinental Dubai Marina, for our own boutique. Downtown is destination retail: people plan a trip there to shop. The Marina brings residents, hotel guests and international visitors into the same neighbourhood, and being here has shown us a different side of Dubai's watch market, one built more on repeat local relationships and on people buying, selling and trading independently.
These areas serve different parts of the market rather than competing for the same buyers. The Dubai Mall concentrates brand-led retail and tourist spending, DIFC connects watches with Dubai's wealth and financial community, Deira and Bur Dubai carry the city's trading history, and places like Dubai Marina bring the market closer to the people who live and stay here.
What it adds up to
No single advantage made Dubai a watch city. A trusted retailer who arrived early, a trading culture, a location between Europe and Asia, tens of millions of visitors and a growing community of wealthy residents all developed at the same time, and each one made the others stronger.
From behind the counter, that's what we find most interesting about this market. Dubai isn't just somewhere luxury watches get sold. Watches keep moving here: from the brands to the retailers, from the retailers to collectors, and from collectors into the secondary market and on to their next owner. The authorised boutiques, the collectors and the pre-owned trade grew up together, and they still depend on each other.
It's also still changing. Dubai's place in the global watch trade doesn't rest on one advantage any more, and that's exactly what makes it hard to knock. For a closer look at who's buying and how the market is behaving right now, read our overview of the luxury watch market in Dubai.
Visit Bramleys in Dubai Marina
Bramleys was founded by Dean Bramley and has been part of Dubai's pre-owned luxury market for more than eight years. You'll find us on the 1st Floor of the InterContinental Dubai Marina, open Monday to Saturday, or you can message the team on WhatsApp if you're hunting for a particular reference. We ship worldwide, and if you're ready to part with a watch you can sell or consign it with us.
