Great. Thank you, Vickie.

Good morning and thank you for joining us today. With me here are Tad Smith, Sotheby’s President and Chief Executive Officer; and Mike Goss, Chief Financial Officer.

GAAP refers to Generally Accepted Accounting Principles in the United States of America. In this earnings call, financial measures are presented in accordance with GAAP and also on an adjusted non-GAAP basis.

An explanation of the non-GAAP financial measures used in this earnings call, as well as reconciliations to the comparable GAAP amount is provided in the company’s Form 10-Q for the period ended September 30, 2016. Also, during the course of this call, the company may make projections or other forward-looking statements regarding future events or the future financial performance of the company.

We wish to caution you that such projections and statements are only predictions and involve risks and uncertainties, resulting in the possibility, that the actual events or performance will differ materially from such predictions. We refer you to the documents the company files periodically with the Securities and Exchange Commission, specifically the company’s most recently filed Form 10-Q and Form 10-K.

These documents identify important factors that could cause the actual results to differ materially from those contained in the projections or forward-looking statements, also please see our Investor webpage for a transcript of our prepared remarks as well as the presentation detailing our rolling six months results. Now, I’ll turn the call over to Tad.

Thanks, Jen. Thank you for joining us everyone and also for your interest in Sotheby’s.

Underneath the seasonally weak results that we expected during the quarter, we are pleased both with some small signs that the market might stabilize and also more significant internal progress on our initiatives such that, when the market does stabilize, Sotheby’s will be poised to do very well for shareholders. With respect to the results for the quarter, this morning we reported an adjusted net loss of $43.1 million and adjusted diluted loss per share of $0.78, which compares to $17.9 million and $0.26 loss respectively a year ago.

Mike Goss will go into the details later, but the impact of the seasonality of our business was further exacerbated by changes to the sale calendar relative to last year, the timing of some previously mentioned inventory transactions that favored last year’s results, and some non-cash writedowns and losses on inventory that we sold. Turning to the market, there are four data points that can give us a potential read on the market: #1, operational data in the third quarter versus the same period last year and also versus earlier in 2016; #2, the Hong Kong sales in October; #3, the London Contemporary Frieze Week sales; and #4, the results of consignment-getting for the upcoming major New York sales as well as the interest level in our material and the anecdotal evidence we are hearing from clients around the world.

Excluding last year’s summer Contemporary sale in London, which took place in the third quarter of 2015, the operational statistics for this third quarter compared to the prior periods give some cause for optimism. But the quarter itself is so small and the number of sales so few, that one needs to be cautious when using this data.

Total hammer sales, excluding buyer’s premium, were down only 8% in the third quarter compared to the third quarter of 2015, while the year-to-date total was down 26%. Although the rate of the decline slowed, the third quarter accounts for a small 7% of our overall annual sales.

The percentage of unsold lots in the third quarter was 19% versus 23% for the same period a year ago, and 21% year-to-date. Our performance against low estimate was 114% versus 101% a year ago in the third quarter and versus 98% on a year-to-date basis.

The overall number of bidders and buyers was up 33% and 21% respectively over this same period, and the average number of bidders per sold lot was also up, by 15%. The Hong Kong sales in early October were weaker than we would have liked, but the shortfalls were concentrated in two areas: Jewelry and Chinese Works of Art.

Many other areas did quite well, including Modern and Contemporary Asian Art, where top-quality modern works continued to command strong prices, and demand for contemporary Japanese and Chinese works was noteworthy. However, the comparison to the same period a year ago, as well as all of 2016 compared to 2015 is what is most revealing about the current state of the Hong Kong and Greater China markets.

This October, leaving aside the luxury sectors of wine, jewelry and watches, sales of art alone were down only 7%. And looking year-over-year, sales of art in Hong Kong in 2016 were actually up 3%.

Insofar as it reflects strength among Chinese buyers, our recent sales may bode well for our important New York auctions later this month. The London Contemporary Frieze Week sales were encouraging.

Although the consignment-getting period for the sales was more difficult, that is a bit of a lagging indicator because consignments were mainly secured during the summer months. The performance of the sales themselves was positive, with an overall total of $107.8 million, above our $90.9 million high estimate and with 91% of lots sold.

The top lot of the week across all auction houses was Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Hannibal, when seven bidders drove the canvas to $13.1 million, more than double the high estimate. Also noteworthy was our Contemporary Day sale, which achieved $19.2 million and was 86.7% sold by lot, the strongest sell-through rate for an October Contemporary Day sale in seven years.

For both of these sales, the high sell-through rates may signal that the market is increasingly in a buying mood. Turning to the upcoming major New York sales, we feel good.

Our Impressionist and Modern Art Evening sale in New York on the 14th carries a low estimate of $145.8 million, which is similar in size to the other three major sales in the category we’ve held this year. The top lot is Edvard Munch’s Seminal Girls on the Bridge from 1902, one of the most powerful paintings of the artist’s career, which is estimated to achieve an excess of $50 million.

This marks the third time we sold this particular painting since 1996 and each time it is performed well. We are also pleased to be offering property from a notable American collection assembled over multiple generations and led by Pablo Picasso’s The Painter and His Model from 1963, which is estimated at $12 million to $18 million.

Our contemporary Art Evening sale on the 17th has a low estimate of $208.6 million, which is competitively very strong for the season. The sale will open with 25 works assembled by Steven and Ann Ames noted American collectors and philanthropists, including two monumental abstract masterpieces by Gerhard Richter estimated at $20 million to $30 million each.

Other highlights include Andy Warhol’s Self Portrait, Fright Wig, from the artist’s seminal 1986 series, which is estimated at $20 million to $30 million, and Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Brother’s Sausage, a monumental frieze at six panels, which carries an estimate of $15 million to $20 million. Turning to internal progress, I’m delighted with our internal progress against the key priorities we announced 18 months ago.

At the high-end of the fine art market, our market share has recovered nicely and especially in contemporary art. Our team is superb and we’ve done extremely well in the marketplace on both consignment side, and most importantly, in the auction room where performance really matters.

Our private sales are seeing some traction and that is particularly encouraging given that we’ve plenty work still to do both within the organization with our tools. Speaking of tools, one of the fundamental pieces required to grow our private sale business is the creation of a sophisticated object database, which would allow us to be much more nimble in connecting buyers and sellers.

And one hidden benefit of our recent acquisition of the Mei Moses Index is its existing database of 45,000 objects that provides us with a significant foundation to that project. Our art advisory business has added a number of clients and has a rich pipeline of discussions for future growth, much of our advisory work is never made public, but one recent example that we can share involve the landmark capital gift that enabled the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York to raise more than $100 million for their expansion project in less than three months.

The fund raising effort involved a matched gift of $42.5 million from a collector, who retained our subsidiary Art Agency, Partners, to structure and realize the gift. Turning to our strategy of building our middle market capabilities, we are also on the right track.

For example, in the third quarter, first time bidders at Sotheby’s grew 61% versus a year ago and many were concentrated in middle market sales. One of the keys to developing our middle market business is the effective use of new technologies, and here again the signs are encouraging.

Year-to-date online sales at Sotheby’s have already exceeded a $119 million, a 23% increase compared to 2015, which is particularly meaningful given the decline in sales volume overall. One in three bidders at Sotheby’s bids online.

Online bidding has emerged as the most popular method of participation for new clients with 44% of all new bidders coming through our online channels. Most powerful is the fact that 40% of all online bidders are new to Sotheby’s, so it is not just about existing clients choosing an online path to engage with us, this is about adding new clients.

We are also developing new products to engage with both existing and new audiences. In the third quarter, we launched Android and Amazon Fire TV apps, which joined our existing iPhone, iPad and Apple TV apps.

We also just submitted a Samsung Smart TV app and expect approval in the coming weeks. We officially launched the Sotheby’s Museum Network, an online destination to discover video content created by and about the world’s leading museums, and added numerous esteemed partners including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Château de Versailles and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice.

Many of the world’s most important collectors either have their own private museums or benefactors of major institutions. And the Museum Network gives us meaningful opportunities to support their objectives in a way that differentiates us.

We recently took another step in modernizing our information technology operation by completing phase one of moving our data systems to Amazon Web Services, a cloud-based web infrastructure service. This brings our operation in line with best practices and improves the performance, availability, flexibility, scalability and reliability of our systems.

The change also lowers our risk profile and we’ll save money as we grow. Finally, I’m thrilled with our team, and the best example of that is to describe some coming attractions of recent successes.

In addition [Technical Difficulty] Ames collection of contemporary art, I mentioned earlier, our team secured the private collection of David Bowie which will be offered in London this week. The collection is valued at more than $13 million and led by many of the most important British artists of the 20th century, including Henry Moore, Frank Auerbach and Damien Hirst.

In addition to targeting existing collectors, we continue to open up the world of Sotheby’s to new audiences through engaging editorial and video content that is a bit seen by millions of viewers, as well as creative events at Twitter in San Francisco and Soho House locations across the globe. The public exhibition in London opened less than a week ago, and is already been seen by more than 24,000 visitors.

Experimentation to broaden our networks is happening across the company in interesting and creative ways including partnering with influencers and tastemakers on auctions. The team engaged Asian pop icon, T.O.P, and renowned fashion designer Anya Hindmarch as guest curators on sales of contemporary art in Hong Kong and London respectively.

In both sales, 20% of the buyers were new to Sotheby’s and final totals exceeded our presale expectations. Other recent sales that were particularly successful include our Asia Week sales in New York which totaled $63.5 million, well above our presale high estimate of $36 million.

While, there were a number of strong prices, the undisputed highlight was the evening sale of The Roy and Marilyn Papp Collection of Chinese Paintings, where the bidding was so deep that it took more than four hours to sell just a 115 paintings. The final total of $32.2 million was double the high estimate.

In Paris, at the end of September we presented the collection of noted tastemaker, Robert de Balkany, a three-day event that totaled an outstanding $21.6 million with a sell through rate of 96%. The top lot was the stunning Roman cabinet that sold for $2.8 million to the Paul Getty museum in Los Angeles.

And speaking of the team, I’m delighted to welcome our newest member of the Board of Directors Linus Cheung. Linus is a distinguished executive who spent 10 years with Hong Kong Telecom, including six years as Chief Executive Officer.

Prior to that post, he spent 23 years of Cathay Pacific. He is also a passionate collector and a long time participant in our sales rooms around the world.

This addition to our Board is particularly important for three reasons: one, Linus has years of history with our company as a client; two, he hails from a crucial part of our world Greater China that will be the foundation of a bright future for Sotheby’s; three, and his appointment is an important symbol of the relationships that Sotheby’s is building in China, especially with the help of our largest shareholder Taikang. What to expect in coming quarters?

We are incredibly optimistic and enthusiastic about Sotheby’s prospects in the coming year, and I think our investors, clients and staff should be as well. Here is what to expect.

I’m looking forward to our management and specialists ranks being deepened by the arrival of new key staff including Marc Porter and Saara Pritchard, as well as others yet to be announced who will join us beginning after the first of the New Year. Furthermore, efforts to deepen our bench in underserved geographies will increase, and our focus will intensify on maximizing business opportunities such as jewelry, wine and cars.

Most importantly for our future, our strategic thinking will evolve from such basic questions as, quote, what gain do we want to compete in and how do we win consistently to one such as how does Sotheby’s change the game to increase dramatically the rewards, declines and shareholders over the longer-term. With that, let me now turn it over to Mike for a more detailed picture of the financials.

Mike?

Thanks, Tad and good morning everyone. For those of you who have been following us for the past several months, you’ve heard me say why it makes sense to look at our results on a rolling six month basis as a means of better understanding our business.

It makes particular sense when looking at our seasonally small first and third quarters when the impact of changes in the auction schedule or one-off transactions can significantly impact our results. This approach also makes it easier to understand our cost structure, given that we’ve recognized most of our incentive compensation in the second and fourth quarters.

So to that end, this morning we have begun a practice of posting rolling six month data to our Investor Relations website and I will be referring to that data from time-to-time in this morning’s call. As we highlighted on this call three months ago, third quarter results were expected to be quite weak, due to several clearly identifiable factors.

And I’d say, the actual results reported this morning bore out that prediction. First, our annual London contemporary summer sales took place this year during the second quarter, but we are comparing ourselves in this quarter to a year-end which the same sale took place in last year’s third quarter.

Thus on a reported basis, our net auction sales look as if they declined by 57% for the quarter. However, as Tad mentioned, if you remove the $197 million attributable to last year’s London sales from last year’s third quarter, you see Net Auction Sales declined only 8% year-over-year.

But given how seasonally small the third quarter always is, I suggest if you want a more meaningful read of the markets, you should look at our trailing six month results and you’ll see a 22% decline in Net Auction Sales, and for our trailing nine months, you’ll see a 26% decline. The second major factor driving the unfavorable comparison to last year is the $15 million adverse swing in Inventory Activities, driven by two independent factors.

First, in 2015 we had a significant gain on the sale of a single painting, which accounted for the overwhelming majority of last year’s $9 million gain. In contrast, this year we generated losses of $6 million from unprofitable inventory sales and from write downs of inventory yet to be sold because we’ve been focused on converting our older inventory to cash in order to redeploy that cash to better uses.

With this decision has come some pain, but we think this is the right way to think about capital allocation. On the positive side, mitigating the adverse impacts of our auction timing and inventory redeployment issues is continued improvement on the auction commission margin front.

Here again, I would strongly encourage that investors look beyond this quarter’s deceptively positive 21.6%, and focus instead on a rolling six month Auction Commission Margin of 16.9%, which continues to represent marked improvements over the same period a year ago. While much of this margin improvement is due to a shift in mix towards lower price bands, we believe it also reflects greater pricing discipline.

On the expense lines, we did a reasonably good job controlling costs, with adjusted expenses down 6% for the quarter and 12% lower for the rolling six months. With respect to taxes, once we changed our APB 23 assertion late last year and because we’ve seen relatively stronger results in Asia where tax rates are lowest, our tax rate decreased significantly during the quarter to 24%.

Now, this is always helpful in periods of income, but it is detrimental in periods of loss such as this one. As a result, we recognized less of an income tax benefit relative to our net loss in this current third quarter, but for the full year this lower rate will definitely help.

And finally, another development that benefits us in profitable periods but is a disadvantage in loss periods is the impact of having a smaller share count due to our share repurchases. As of October 31st, we have 53 million shares outstanding, a 24% decrease from 15 months ago, when we had 69.5 million shares outstanding, thanks to our aggressive stock repurchase program.

Before we open things up for Q&A, I would like to speak to two other issues relevant to investors reviewing this morning’s results. First, a significant factor in our reported GAAP earnings is related to the accounting for our acquisition of Art Agency, Partners, or AAP.

You may recall, as part of the acquisition agreement, we agreed to make certain earn-out payments for AAP contingent on the performance of our Contemporary, Modern, and Impressionist categories against certain absolute and relative financial targets. Despite the fact that this arrangement was really part of the consideration paid for AAP, estimates of amounts due under this earn-out arrangement are, for accounting purposes, deemed to be compensation expense recorded in operating expenses over the period during which the financial performance targets are achieved.

Given our year-to-date progress against these financial targets and our visibility into the upcoming November sales, accounting rules require that we recognize approximately $17 million of expense in this quarter. Because these payments can reasonably be viewed as part of the consideration paid for the acquisition of AAP and not as ongoing compensation expense, we are excluding these expenses from our adjusted results.

We should also note that this accounting charge does not impact the four year schedule over which these payments will be made. The second issue I’d like to discuss is the outlook for the fourth quarter, to the extent that it is wise to do so without the benefit of the results of any of our major November sales.

We believe that when one excludes the $383 million single-owner Taubman sale from the year ago period, we will likely see a lower sales level in the fourth quarter consistent with the trends we’ve seen during the past six and nine month periods of down 22% and 26%, respectively. Offsetting this lower sales level versus a year ago will be several factors working strongly in our favor, year over year positive comparisons in our Auction Commission Margin, especially given the recently introduced increase to our Buyer’s Premium schedule.

We’ve kept our operating expenses in check. We’re benefitting from a more favorable tax rate.

And our aggressive share repurchase program means that we’ll be reporting our earnings against a much lower share count. The net result, we believe our fourth quarter adjusted earnings per share can be in the range of last year’s adjusted EPS despite the tougher market and lower sales levels.

So Tad and I are now happy to address your questions.

Hi, good morning. And thanks for taking the question.

Hi, David.

Hi, there. So I guess, first if you could talk - I just wanted to follow-up, follow directions, first could you talk about.

There is a little bit of this in the release and a little bit on the call. But just the way you think the way our agency partners does business and how that will over a long term view, say, five years from now, how will that evolve to work with the auctions?

How do you see those two pieces of the business being sort of more than the sum of the parts, that will be my first one.

Well, the Art Agency, Partners’ principals have several different hats. First of all, one of them is Chairman of the Fine Art Division and she has been materially involved in directing the departments including Contemporary, Modern and Impressionist for the auction part of the business, for the private sales part of the business.

And she’s also been closely allied with another one; this is Allan, who is also Chairman of the Fine Art Division. And his main focus has been supporting the auction side of the business, but also leading the advisory part of the business.

So they are actually the management team of the worldwide departments for Contemporary, Modern and Impressionist. So they are deeply and meaningfully integrated into it.

The third principal at Art Agency, Partners is Adam Chinn. And Adam is the head - in fact, he’s the company’s top worldwide dealmaker.

So he is the one that is effectively on the frontline in terms of managing the deals, managing the margins, if you will, working with the business managers of the various departments to ensure that we do smart deal making in terms of both margins, guarantees and hedging our financial risks. So rather than have them - well, I inferred from your question that you had a model or may have a model in your mind that they’re somehow on the side.

They’re actually - the AAP is fully integrated and deeply driving the core part of our business, Auction, as well as also their team is leading the newer parts of the business, such as advisory, and driving the parts of the such as private sales, at least with respect Modern, Impressionist and Contemporary Art.

No, that’s exactly what I meant; it’s how are the folks involved helping the other parts of business. So thanks so much Tad for that.

Follow-up is more of a housekeeping question. How should we think about fourth quarter incentive comp?

There has been - is it more like a 2Q 2016 and more like a 4Q 2015, how do we think about the - or how are you thinking about that?

It’s too soon to say. With respect to fourth quarter incentive comp, it’s important to see that pretty much all of the more senior people in the organization have incentive compensation that has two components.

One is the financial performance of the company. And the second is their individual contribution.

My own view and by the way, with respect to, I believe, almost all, not just executives, but senior people in the organization. I believe the financial performance is by far the largest portion.

With notable exceptions, both geographic region and some departments, the financial performance will fall short of the budget this year. And as a consequence, you’ll see a pick up from an expense perspective on that.

At the same time, we’ve had excellent contributions on an individual basis, and so, how those two shakeouts should be a net positive vis-à-vis last year, I would thank on the expense line. And I think that was consistent with what Mike was trying to flash in giving you a sense for where the fourth quarter adjusted earnings per share would come out.

So I don’t know what else. There is not much more to say, the fourth…

No, very helpful.

We’re going to see how the fourth quarter revenue and profit goes. I will say, I’m very - as I said, I’m very encouraged with the performance of everyone.

But the financials sort of are where they are and the individual contribution, I think, we’re going to work hard on.

Thanks a lot.

Hi, thanks. Good morning, Tad and Mike.

The comments, Tad, about the greens-hoots in terms of total hammered sales being only down 8% and percentage of unsold lots, what do you think is underlying those trends in terms of what we should think about your - what you’re seeing with the dynamics between buyers and sellers and your feelings on how people are thinking about both sides of that? And also how do we reconcile this with your explicit cautionary terms on fourth quarter, at least at the top line in terms of lower sales levels.

It does sound like you have a really compelling initiatives in place, so congrats on all the modernization going on.

Well, it’s a very shrewd question, Oliver. I mean, when you think about it, the performance of our sales on any given date is the mix of two things.

One is the degree that which we had consignments in the auction room, and that is typically something that’s going to depend on, again, the drivers of consignments which I’ve probably talked about a lot, but I’ll - just as a quick refresher, the state planning its debt, its divorce and its discretion. But that typically happens several months in advance of the actual sale date.

In the auction room, however, you get a real - an immediate sense for what is the psychology, what is the pricing, what is the sense, what is the relative level of confidence, and what is the enthusiasm for the quality of the art at that moment in time. So you have an interesting thing.

So for example, the November sales are a mix of two different kinds of sentiments. One is the sentiment of consigners who have the discretion to choose when to consign, thinking about what’s the offer for my art, what’s the estimate on my art, how do I feel about the U.S.

elections, how do I feel about the overall environment. And they’re trying to make that decision in June, July, August, September potentially October, but not too late in October, early in October.

And then, when you actually get in the sale room on November 14 and 17 for the big New York Evening sales, you’re going to have things like the auction - excuse me, the election in the rearview mirror. You’re going to have - if it’s the 17, you’re going to have some data points for some other auction houses.

You’re going to have a completely different mindset, a completely different level of information. So consigners have necessarily less information than the buyers, given that the point - that the traction point is the date of the sale itself.

And what that means is when you look at the fourth quarter, some portion of the fourth quarter is necessarily a reflection of what we have in the auction house, and some portion, arguably a lesser portion is how the sales themselves perform. And what that yields is you can feel relatively optimistic about the market looking for a rallying point, and yet still cautious on the financials, and more importantly, cautious on the forecast in the fourth quarter.

And I think that’s where we are. We are - I think there are a lot of indicators that look positive and yet prudence dictates that we should wait and see.

Thank you for that. Best regards.

Thank you, Oliver.

Thank you. Tad, I wanted to ask the last question a little differently.

Earlier in your commentary, you mentioned one of the factors you’re encouraged about is the anecdotal evidence you’re hearing from collectors. And I wondered if you could be a little more specific about that.

Thank you for noticing that. I realized I accidentally edited out over the weekend.

I actually had paragraph on that. So I’m glad you brought up.

Yes, actually we are seeing - I’ve been travelling extensively talking a lot of our both consigners and buyers. And it’s clear that coming out - the summer was a little bit of a pattern of the doldrums.

Coming out of the summer there was a little bit more confidence, consignments began to pick up. Some very interesting things came to the marketplace.

And there is a sense in the art market from lots and lots of consigners that we’ve had a long sort of not very exciting patch during the art market, and that they are looking for an opportunity to buy. I mentioned in prior earnings call that there a lot of people that have a lot of money and are very interested in buying good things or things at good prices or both.

And those folks are eager to see good things and good things or good prices in the auction rooms, but the problem more recently in the last number of quarters has been a little bit of reticence on the part of consigners who have the discretion not to consign to wait and see how things that are uncertainty shake out. So if we can get past a little bit of that consigning side confidence, and I think in many ways the coming sales do, we have a number of excellent pieces in the sales, and I think optimistic they will perform very well just as the most of the Hong Kong stuff did and as well as the October London sales did, will get us back into a much better track, because people have money.

They’re tired of the doldrums. They’d like to spend and they’d like to find things to spend it on.

And we need to take that confidence, convey it to the marketplace and then encourage consigners as we finish up the year and also beginning London sales in February, and Old Master sales in January and into the spring next year, give consigners the kind of confidence to show that there is money there to be had, but we really need to step up and deliver.

Got you. I’m curious.

You presented a number of analytics about demand in collectors certainly more than we’ve heard historically. I’m curious if you can give us a sense of how you are using this information to run the business differently?

On the demand side or general?

On the demand in the collector’s side, yes, I think you’re providing a fair amount of information about both.

Yes, where there are two things I would say. I would put the pieces of information as two buckets.

The first one is we are using all of the online side to measure progress on how we are doing on the online piece, meaning, each quarter, each sale, each month we get weekly reports. We like to see that the percentage of lot that is sold online goes up.

We like to monitor, for example, the percentage of the new buyers that are a total percentage of online buyers to know that we’re reaching new markets. And those I would say, we are tracking to keep score that are initiatives, they’re on track.

On the other side, we have, and have developed an extensive CRM program, which we are using to take new buyers and begin to make more offers to them. And that’s clearly where we are going to be developing in the future, so what you will see is - in a perfect world, in my view the perfect world is, if you underbid for a particular painting in an auction and you don’t get it within 24 hours I would like for Sotheby’s to have for you an opportunity to buy something very similar or something that’s exactly the same or something close to it, or something that is based upon a relational database.

All of that stuff is exactly the kind of plumbing that we are developing right now. And you can see some portion of it on the demand side.

In terms of how we use, for example, the sell-through rates in the auction room, those are very important data to go to consigners to help build confidence for them that not only is it a general feeling that the market could turn, but also that there are some specific data points that their picture will do well. So pretty much every piece of information we use or we bring out of the auction room will feed into a consignment conversation and consignment dialogue.

All of those other things we do, and then of course we have general discussions, which is how specifically is the art market doing, and these are with prospective, I’d say, consigners or investors to give them sense for how the business is doing at an analytical level. So we have multiple elements of using our operational data going forward, and all of it feeds back into pretty much the effort to drive more revenue going forward.

Very helpful. Thank you.

Good morning, guys. There are so many elements of retail that are being in some way changed by e-commerce and the ability of sellers to utilize different channels.

I’m curious, whether you guys are seeing an increase from any start-ups, do you think are meaningfully making any, I guess, noise in your space and creating challenges for you guys?

Well, first of all the auction space. And I wouldn’t even describe it just as the auction space, let’s just say, generally the retail space, retail for luxury.

Both of those spaces have numerous online startups and numerous online competitors. And what I would say generally about those is that when you look at our core business model, whether it is the brand, the promises that we bring both in the auction room and also in private sales, the warranties, the specialist expertise, all of those things are pretty significant differentiators and arguably strategic moats against a disruptive incursion from an online competitor.

At the same time, they impose upon us and - because the - one ancillary effect of all of the online competitors is that our own clients insist that we perform at a superior level in both technology and online. And so we - it’s incumbent upon us to deliver a phenomenal online product that also has our brand and our warranties and our promises and those things.

And so we need to do that. Do we at this point see a disruption?

No, we’re not seeing it. And by the way, we’re looking hard.

And by the way, we’re exploring all sorts of interesting things, whether its virtual technology, insertions of pictures on wall, the whole range of different things you could think about that give us a lot of enthusiasm more than anything for Sotheby’s future. We do not have a significant investment in real estate in multiple locations.

We are not dependent on what I would say is classic store traffic. So we don’t have any of the classic retail weaknesses of other entities in the space that could be, for lack of a better word, Amazon.

And it’s probably worth noting that we have for the last 16 years been coexisting in an environment, which has both eBay and Amazon in it. And eBay is, in some sense, a partner of ours.

So I look at that and I say, we haven’t seen a potential Internet disruptor yet. If anything, the Internet and all of the changes coming with technology seem to blow a very strong wind in the sales for Sotheby’s, both for revenue going forward and valuation going forward, I’m a big fan.

I will pivot to one last thing. In the area of furniture I think 1stDibs in particular is doing some interesting things and they bear watching.

Okay. Just one follow-up on this, you guys talked a little bit about making larger investments in jewelry, wine and cars.

And I know you’ve had some success earlier this year in some of those areas. I guess if you can talk a little bit about how large you think that those opportunities are, because those are obviously some pretty big categories where if you guys wanted to make large investments I’m sure you could.

Thanks.

Yes. It’s - well there are two things.

First of all, in jewelry the business is enormous. Figuring out where Sotheby’s plays, in which part of the value chain is really the opportunity there.

We have a solidly good auction business, and we have an excellent management team. And we have a potentially interesting private sales business that I think could be larger and more robust.

And we also have a positioning, where the value of the brand and the value of the jewelries and things like Sotheby’s Diamonds are interesting. How we play in that and where we play in the value chain and how we do something that takes advantages of our strength, but doesn’t necessarily get us into - well, doesn’t necessarily strand capital or have us move into terribly competitive difficult parts of that market is the trick.

And that’s more a strategy and management question than it is something more than that. I think there are areas where we can grow without massive investments of capital, and that’s certainly what we’re going to be looking for.

In terms of Wine, Wine is a bit more complex, because it is subject to multiple regulations in a lot of different jurisdictions. We have a nice and relatively small business there.

I believe that with some applications of technology - which technologies, by the way, have largely been focused on art thus far, although they will be expanded in the future. I think we can do more in the Wine.

And in the space of cars, we have a partnership with RM Auctions. We are delighted with that partnership.

We think they do a very good job and how we can do more in the car space is definitely on our minds. But I wouldn’t necessarily have read my - or have inferred that my comment meant that there were going to be massive amounts of capital sloshing around, chasing any of those opportunities, that’s certainly not we intended.

Okay. Thank you very much.

Well, listen, thank you all, everybody. I want please to encourage you to tune to the David Bowie Sale.

I myself and my wife were looking at the catalogue last night. And believe me there is something in there priced for everyone.

It’s a magnificent catalogue to sales of this week. And I strongly encourage anyone in New York please to set up either through me, Mike or Jennifer, a trip over to Sotheby’s.

We’ve got some amazing art this week. And I thank you for your interest in Sotheby’s and appreciate that you, our investors and interested.

Thanks.