The historic EGM meeting on 30 September 2019 has fully validated our strategy of changing our name and extending our corporate purpose from Artprice.com to Artmarket.com and all of the relevant statute amendments. All of the shareholders fully understood and voted to approve our strategy. thierry Ehrmann, Founder/CEO of Artprice, along with all his colleagues, wishes to thank them for their confidence and support.
LOGO: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/817151/Artprice_Logo.jpg
To be called ArtMarket.com on the stock market (the mnemonic code is still PRC) represents a superb intangible asset adding enormous value to the company. Indeed, apart from the intrinsic value of the DNS, the new name will propel our group into the smallest interstices of the tentacular Internet and search engines all over the world.
Difficult to talk about the Art Market without using the term "Art Market"... What could be more unifying? We have become unavoidable? For us the two words represent Internet's Holy Grail... opening doors in a rational and scientific way to almost all the information on the Art Market.
Calling ourselves ArtMarket.com is the instant equivalent of a major global campaign of communication and promotion costing several tens of millions of euros... and there can be no doubt about its positive impact on the stock market, especially as we expecting a record result this year.
In 2019, Artprice and Cision (PRNewswire) are renewing their framework agreement with Artmarket.com so that we can send our proprietary content in real time to 5 continents in 18 languages reaching 2.1 billion individuals (notary registered 2019 data, Matre Pons). This unparalleled alliance between two world leaders in the Art and the Wire markets - after 20 years of collaboration - has effectively created the largest press agency on the Art Market.
As we accelerate towards the all-digital era, Artmarket.com allows Artprice.com to accompany the historical paradigm shift that dematerialization represents in order to become a global player in the Art Market.
We are also very proud to represent "French tech" (with the renewal of our state-sponsored innovative company label [BPI] for another 3 years) in a digital world where the global leaders are mostly Anglo-Saxon.
In June 2019, Artprice economists identified 37 companies worldwide whose corporate purpose was similar to ours and who raised more than $50 million since 2000. 100% of these companies have filed for bankruptcy or have ceased operating due to a lack of revenue. This means that Artmarket.com is now operating in a massive open field with colossal barriers to entry, both in terms of the capital required and the time needed to set up this kind of business.
Patrick Drahi's recent acquisition of Sotheby's is a starck reminder that the Art Market is not immune to digitization and dematerialization. Drahi is a Networks and Telecoms man.
Nearly 20 years ago, Artprice was far ahead of its time and it still is. While many doubted the Art Market would ever change and adapt to new technologies, we were convinced it would. Our position as World Leader in Art Market Information is the direct result of this firm conviction.
While some continued secretly recording sales result (thereby perpetuating the Art Market's opacity and its restriction to a caste of insiders), Artprice's historians and documentalists digitized and annotated hundreds of millions of historical documents, allocating IDs to every artist and every work. This massively time-consuming investment generated the largest existing databases which we made available to everyone on the Art Market so that artworks could be bought and sold under optimal conditions and people could educate themselves about the art market.
Over two decades, Artprice has seen its standardization accepted by the Art Market and it is now considered a vital and authoritative reference by all players in this market, whatever their size and wherever they are located.
It should be noted that Artprice has acquired a number of highly valuable scientific and historical documents around the world and that these assets will be fully exploited by Artmarket.com thanks to the extension of its corporate purpose and the amendments to its Statutes that have just been approved.
Our headstart has allowed us to win...
Our work, our ideas and our convictions have helped to make the Art Market more understandable and more democratic. The knowledge previously guarded by a small number of insiders is now accessible to all of our clients. Meanwhile, the volume of secondary market transactions has rocketed, massively increasing the Art Market's liquidity. As we have repeatedly explained in our communications over recent years, it is now an efficient market generating returns comparable to financial markets.
Since 2000, the Art Market's global secondary market turnover has risen 383% and its return on investment, according to our Artprice100(R) index, was 16% in the first half of 2019 compared with interest rates close to zero on the money markets.
As we predicted, the Internet has of course exploded exponentially. Whereas Internet consultation used to be only possible from desktop or home computers, now, with the mobile Internet reaching 5.4 billion smartphones in the world, one can access the same services anywhere: from galleries, auction rooms, art dealers, valuers, art fairs, museums, etc. Today 4G, Wi-Fi via optical fiber and now ultra high speed 5G networks make it even easier and faster for Art Market and its customers around the world.
According to our calculations, with our recent strategic developments - including the name change to Artmarket - we are currently at less than 10% of our economic potential with a horizon of 5 years.
In short, the Art Market cannot indefinitely ignore the digital era and the Internet. Compared to many other sectors in the economy, the Art Market is operating with a unique lag of nearly 30 years... and that lag will inevitably translate into Artmarket's future prosperity.
The future is in Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Augmented and/or Virtual Reality, 8K, and Blockchain...
Artmarket.com has no intention of lagging behind these technologies. An article published in Les Echos (24.09.2019) gives a superb indication of where we are heading: "Artificial Intelligence enters the Museum World" (L'intelligence artificielle entre au Musee).
Artmarket.com's role as the spearhead of the Art Market's technological future is 100% legitimate considering that its head offices are located at the heart of the Organe Contemporary Art Museum (which manages the open-to-the-public La Demeure du Chaos (Abode of Chaos dixit the NY Times), ranked the top Contemporary Art Museum in France by Google reviews (notary registered ranking by Maitre Pons on 4 September 2019).
During the recent European Heritage Days (weekend of 21 and 22 September 2019), The Organe Contemporary Art Museum (effectively Artprice/Artmarket's HQ) hosted 18,000 visitors thanks to our in-depth knowledge and use of social networks and new technologies. As a highly popular museum, we regularly experiment, in situ, with proprietary high-tech solutions to help our visitors discover the 9000 m[2] of our site containing 6,300 works. We have therefore demonstrated our know-how in the Museum Industry field, particularly on 360 degrees vision in Pro2 8K by the global leader Insta360, for whom Artmarket's technical department has been a 'beta tester' and a Google referenced pioneer for many years.
Virtual tours of our headquarters, including via Facebook VR Oculus headsets, whose number we can already count on media such as Google, Facebook, Flickr and Instagram (with our 9 million followers), are increasingly popular around the world (there have been 8,100 media reports about the Abode of Chaos / Organe Contemporary Art Museum). All of this exposure is hugely positive for the growth of Artmarket.com and represents a massive and permanent advertising campaign.
Based on Google and Flickr counting of single virtual visitors in 360 degrees 4K and 8k in the Contemporary Art segment, our head office, the Organe Contemporary Art Museum, is no. 2 in France with 4.5 million visitors behind the Center Georges Pompidou, followed closely by the Louis Vuitton Foundation.
Very soon Artprice Images(R) - which currently gives subscribers unlimited access to the world's largest Art Market database of 180 million photographic or etched images of artworks from 1700 to the present day (each
