The Role of Art & Antique Dealers An Added Value 2.2 Employment
Comprehensive global data on the dealer sector of the market is more limited than that on auction houses, and depends to a large extent on surveys and interviews. In 2010, dealers from CINOA were polled in Europe, the US and other international art markets to ascertain both key quantitative information and qualitative views. According to this survey by Arts Economics, most dealers’ businesses could be classed as SMEs or Small to Medium Enterprises, which are defined as businesses with an annual sales turnover of less than €50 million per annum. The majority of these SMEs could be classified further as “micro-enterprises”, i.e. with turnover of less than €2 million. In this survey, of those polled, only 4% reported sales of greater than €10 million each year, and 1% of those had sales greater than €50 million. In other words, the survey results reiterated the point above that there are a small number of dealers responsible for a large bulk of the sector’s turnover.
Another method of classifying businesses is by headcount. Using this definition, the vast majority of art dealers are what are sometimes referred to as SOHOs. The SOHO concept (an acronym for small office/home office) refers to the category of businesses which have from one to ten workers (also called micro-offices in the EU). The average headcount of dealers surveyed by CINOA was three to four people, although these ranged from one to 40. (A larger business enterprise, one notch up the size scale, is categorised as a small business with l0 to 50 employees, whereas a medium business has 50 to 250 workers, and a large enterprise, rare in the dealer sector, has over 250 workers). By contrast, the top tier auction houses employed between 500 and 1,900 workers in offices around the world, although smaller second tier houses averaged 23 employees in 2010.
Just over 21% of the dealers who responded to the survey were sole traders, and 26% worked with just one other person. In 2009, the share of sole traders was similar at 20%, but 18% of those had dropped their headcount to just one person that year. The majority of dealers in the survey (77%) reported that they had kept staffing levels stable over 2009 despite the recession. In 2010, 26% of dealers reported that they had decreased numbers employed, and of those, most reported that staff cuts amounted to one or two people, a significant decrease in the context of small businesses. Employment in the majority of businesses (54%) remained stable over the year, and 20% actually increased their staff numbers, most commonly adding one person to the business.
The dealers interviewed in this study showed many similarities to those surveyed, also averaging three to four persons (including the owner), although the headcount range was broader, with a minimum of one to a maximum of 100. Most of the dealers interviewed described their businesses as being “tightly controlled” in terms of their cost structures, and employment related costs were a significant part of their businesses. Some had been forced to downsize over 2009 and 2010, although many had also engaged in more flexible working arrangements, such as changing their terms of employment (for example to per hour pay rather
16 Historical & Future Perspectives
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