Pandora A/S Ord

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the conference call for Pandora's second quarter 2024 result. I'm Bilal Aziz from the Investor Relations team. I'm joined here by our CEO, Alessandra Latic, CFO, Anders Boyer, and the remaining IR team. As usual, there will be a Q&A at the end of the call. If you could kindly limit yourself to two questions at a time, that would be great. Please pay notice to the disclaimer on slide two and turn to slide three. I will now hand over to Alessandra.

Thank you Bilal and welcome to sunny Copenhagen all of you. Let me start by highlighting some of the key takeaways for the quarter. First, we had yet another strong quarter. I'm sure it's no surprise to anyone here that the consumer environment remains challenging. And in that context, the quarter speaks volumes of how the Phoenix strategy continues to take us forward. At the core of our strategy is the aim to change the perception of Pandora into a full jewelry brand. And this is already happening. In the quarter, once again, our growth was broad-based across our collections. We are attracting more consumers into the brand, which is the single most important thing for us. On profitability, you would have noticed that our gross margins expanded once again to record high. I know those of you who attended our investor and analyst days in Thailand recently will know the drivers behind this. And for those of you that were unable to attend, I highly advise you to view the slides on our website. You'll also notice that we continue to make significant investments across the entire value chain. This includes, but obviously goes beyond marketing. Despite this, our EBIT margin remains rock solid. As ever, all of these KPIs feed into our unique asset-light model, and we continue to demonstrate very high returns whilst maintaining low leverage. So, in conclusion, quarter two is another proof point that in a tough environment, we are excelling thanks to our strategy. We are taking market share by building a stronger brand. We will stay on this course. Now, let's move to slide four, please. Given our strong start and pipeline of strategic initiatives, we are raising our full-year growth guidance. This now stands at 9-12% organic growth and includes like-for-like growth of 5-7%. We've taken a number of factors into account. We've got good brand momentum, but against this, the macroeconomic backdrop is highly uncertain. The low end of the guidance accounts for this uncertainty and would require the macroeconomic backdrop to get consistently worse relative to today. We'll of course be keeping a close eye on that. Our EBIT margin guidance we've left unchanged at around 25%. We'll continue to press ahead here to invest in growth initiatives whilst maintaining our already high margins. Now, as you know, we typically give a comment on current trading and we do this to give you a feel of the underlying demand trends of our business. And we've clearly started the quarter very, very well. As we have talked about many times before, then you do have to read like for like carefully when you look at short time horizons like the last five to six weeks. because there's always changing in the trading calendar, such as timing of key trading events, like Mother's Day, for instance, how we decide to play in those events, when we launch new collections, etc., etc. So when we look at the business, then the underlying run rate like-for-like growth sits at the mid-single-digit levels. That's a very solid outcome, given, as I'm sure most of you remember, we started to run into tougher comps from June onwards. So in fact, on a two-year stack, like-for-like has therefore actually accelerated during the last two months from where we were in the first half of the year. So just to be clear, Our underlying demand trends remain very healthy at mid-single-digit like-for-like levels. We've started better than that in Q3 in actual terms. The actual like-for-like is currently above mid-single-digit levels, but that is just phasing, as I mentioned. Now, can we move to slide six, please? Before we move on to the more ins and outs of the quarter, I wanted to take a step back and highlight a few things that really drive value at Pandora. Those of you who attended investor and analyst days in Thailand will be familiar with some of this, but I do think it's important to reiterate. One of the questions we often get is what exactly in the Pandora business model is unique? and hard to replicate? And how can you continuously drive a very attractive financial algorithm which boasts industry-leading gross margins and returns? And the answer is that it's all simply a function of the Pandora ecosystem we have built over the decades, which starts with the brand. The Pandora brand is the core reason for the scale we have. The brand is the core reason we can operate a store at a 40% plus EBIT margin on average. As some of you may know, Pandora is the most well-known jewelry brand in the world. That is great and valuable in itself. That in itself is not that easy to copy. But what is even more valuable is the fact that Pandora owns the space of meaningful jewelry in the minds of consumers. And that is incredibly hard to dislodge. You simply cannot replicate that within a few years, maybe even decades. The brand equity has been built up hand in hand with the Moments platform. It takes decades to build jewelry icons. Our icon, the Moments platform, has been built up over 25 years. And that platform icon is the foundation for our brand equity. Last year, our brand drove demand for 107 million pieces of jewelry globally. Think about that, 107 million pieces. We play in the scale game. This level of volume is all a function of our brand. And this is the core of why we have such high margins and store profitability. Next slide, please. Now, around this brand we have been able to build an infrastructure that is hard to replicate. First, we have invested in and built an unmatched global distribution platform. We have a total of around 6,600 points of sales globally. And out of this almost 2,700 are standalone dedicated Pandora concept stores. You could, of course, with time and a lot of money, replicate a store network. But what you cannot just duplicate is the productivity of the stores, the revenue or gross profit per square meter. And this links back to the brand. Next slide, please. Alongside this, the other piece of the puzzle is the crafting and supply side. Some of you recently saw our facilities in real life, and I'm sure you saw firsthand what we built and the complexity of being able to mass produce hand-finished jewelry at the scale we do. Over the years, we've been able to leverage this crafting scale to drive a cost advantage. For those of you familiar with the Pandora case, our gross margins have been high all since the early days. And during the last five years, Pandora has even operated at the high 70s gross margins. And a lot of that is down to the benefits we've driven from crafting and supply. So to conclude, what we have here is a strong ecosystem which starts with the brand. Around this, we built a strong infrastructure with in-house crafting and supply and in-house distribution. We believe this model yields significant benefits compared to subscale competitive sets. And at the same time, it underpins our financial algorithm that I mentioned earlier. Next slide, please. Now, here you will see our equity story. We have made some important updates that reflect the ecosystem that I just referred to. We believe it's important to be sharp about how and why we will continue to create value for our shareholders in the years to come. And this brings me nicely onto the Phoenix strategy, which we have on the next slide. The Phoenix wheel... Next slide, please. There we go. This phoenix wheel serves to drive growth from that ecosystem I just explained. As usual, I'll speak to some of these in detail in the coming slides, but we're making good progress on nearly all of those pillars. Some of them might be moving forward even a bit sooner than what we've said at the CMD last year, but that's all good symptoms of a company which is moving forward with a clear agenda. Now let's get into the brand restaging into a bit more detail. Next slide. There we go. For those of you who might be new to the story, our marketing strategy is centered around the restaging of the Pandora brand. In plain terms, this means we're changing the perception of the brand in the consumer minds towards a full jewelry brand. We've always had a wide variety of collection, but that hasn't always been the consumer perception. And this is now changing. In Q1, with a new campaign under the banner of Be Love, we launched a brand new look and feel for the brand. I'm sure it's caught the eye for most of you. We're moving away from specific product-centric marketing to driving desirability and affinity to the entire Pandora brand. This is a multi-season campaign that we will leverage through the entire year. And I'm happy to report that the restaging is having a positive impact across our business. Our major brand KPIs are moving forward. We've seen strong traffic trends with good customer acquisition, and that's the most important metric I keep looking at. Then as well, our brand desirability metrics are also moving in the right direction. So overall, whilst we're at the early stages of the brand restaging, the signs are good, and we will continue to invest properly behind this. Next slide, please. I already mentioned our growth across all of our collections a few times, but this slide hopefully makes it crystal clear. Our mission is to bring in more consumers that want high quality, precious metal jewelry that means something to them. We then can take them through the entire brand journey across our beautiful collections. So far, so good. You can see on the slide where we've continued to drive growth across our collections with particularly strong growth in the fuel with more segments, exactly in line with our strategic intent. And again, I want to reiterate that I believe we are only at the start of this journey of really stretching the brand. Now let's dive into some of the collections a bit more in detail. Next slide. Let's start with the core. Here, we leverage our strong heritage through our icons while sprinkling on pieces of innovation. As I mentioned when I described our ecosystem, this is what we're known for and this is why you can't replicate our brand equity. Within the core, we had a robust quarter which grew at 1% like for like. Within this, you should be aware that our performance continues to be weighed down by collaborations which goes through specific product cycles. Looking at the moment's platform in isolation, That continues to drive solid and healthy growth of 3% like for like. Meanwhile, growth in Pandora Me continues to be very strong. Next slide, please. On this one, you can see how the fuel would more shaped up in the quarter. The growth continued to be dominated by Timeless. Encouragingly, this is still relatively broad-based. We may have the odd product here and there that sells more due to various social media activations, but it's important to remember that in aggregate, consumers are engaging much more with the collection as a whole, and that's clearly being helped by our brand restaging. I'll touch on our latest and newest collection, Pandora Essence, in the next slide, so I'll quickly cover lab diamonds first. This remains a big strategic bet for us and we can see the big shifts taking place in the market. We've continued to make progress here with 88% like-for-like growth. This is obviously being helped by last year's assortment expansion. So keep in mind that this will annualize during Q3 and growth will naturally moderate. As ever, we continue to learn and drive the business forward. It's important also to emphasize the role the collection is playing in driving our full jewelry brand message to consumers. We can clearly see the halo effect from lab-grown diamond and it's positive to the rest of our collections. That's why we'll continue to push the collection and be active across many PR events. The presence of our global ambassador, Pamela Anderson, at the Met Gala, wearing almost 200 carats of Pandora white and pink lab-grown diamonds being the latest example. Next slide, please. Finally, on the collections, I wanted to speak about our newest and exciting collection, which we've launched during the quarter, Pandora Essence. We announced this at the Capital Markets Day last year, where we said we would be expanding into the aesthetic space of fluid and natural, which constitutes 17% of the total jewelry market. which until now we've had very little presence in. The collection spans across all product categories in rings, necklaces and a great variety of earrings and is overweight plated gold. Now please bear in mind it's still early days since the launch. Q2 only included four to six weeks of trading depending on country, but so far we've seen an encouraging response with the gold and pearl designs resonating very well across all our markets. Overall, the launch has been in line with our expectations that we had post the pilot test we did in Netherlands. Now let's cover some of the markets as well. Let's start with our biggest market, the U.S., which delivered 5% like-for-like growth, a robust quarter in the context of a jewelry market which we believe is still likely in negative territory, and overall remains challenging. Overall, we believe we're still taking market share in the U.S., which is clearly being helped by our positive brand momentum. You will remember that the U.S. remains a big opportunity for network expansion for us, and you can see how that drove overall organic growth at 14% in the quarter. Next slide, please. The performance in our key European market is strong at 10% like-for-like. This was still driven by Germany with a 65% like-for-like growth. As I explained previously, the drivers here remain our brand, which is driving penetration. We do now run into tougher comparative periods, so we expect the growth to moderate but still remain healthy due to the structural factors I've spoken about. The UK jewellery market remains weak, so in that context our stable performance reads quite well and underpins our resilience. In Italy, similarly, the consumer backdrop is challenging and that's impacting our consumers as well. This is one of our most mature markets, so therefore it's natural to be sensitive to the top-down forces a bit more. We are, however, looking to drive growth in our new collections here to build on our consumer base. Finally, in France, our performance was stable as some of our positive brand initiatives were still offset by weakness in the partner channel. As you know, we are working on ways to solve this sore point. Next slide, please. In China, our performance of minus 23 like for like is still disappointing. We are aware, though, that this will be a journey ahead, so we continue to invest into the brand to build our brand equity further. It will require some patience, but we remain persistent. In Australia, the market backdrop was still quite challenging and continued to be impacted by the weak consumer sentiment, which is in particular impacting our partners in Australia. Next slide, please. In the rest of Pandora, we delivered 13% like-for-like growth. Of a tough comparison base, this is a good performance, and the broad-based nature of the growth serves as a good reminder of the many opportunities we have in this segment to continuously grow. We flagged earlier on the year that we expected the growth levels in Turkey and Mexico to moderate somewhat, and that is indeed taking place. You should keep that in mind for the rest of the year as well. Next slide, please. For network plants, we saw another strong contribution from opening new stores of 6% in the quarter. This is still being driven by the openings we had last year, and it's good to see the sales and earnings accretion coming through nicely. We will continue to push ahead with our store opening plans this year, and we have upgraded the target for 2024 to 150 to 225 openings this year. Tied to that, we now expect the organic revenue contribution from network growth to be 4% to 5% rather than the 4% announced previously. Finally, before I hand over to Anders, some of you would have noticed that we opened our first ever flagship store in Copenhagen during the quarter. This is a nice example of our value-creative network expansion, combined with our strategy of elevating brand desirability. The new flagship store is our biggest store globally to date, with around 500 square meters across two floors. Now, you shouldn't expect us to be having a huge number of these globally, but we will expand into a few selected cities globally as we believe the store experience is critically important in elevating the brand. Evoque 2.0 is our core store concept, which most consumers will view and experience. That itself is a big step forward in elevating the brand. And in that context, we continue to make steady progress with our openings here with now 154 Evoque stores open by the end of Q2. And on that note, I'll hand it over to Anders for a closer look at the financials.

Thank you, Alexander, and good morning to everyone on the call. And please turn to slide 24. So Alexander already mentioned at the start of the call that the second quarter was another good reminder of how our business model drives strong KPIs all the way down through the P&L. As usual on this slide, I'll just highlight a couple of the KPIs. And actually, I can't help but start talking a little bit about the gross margin because it did reach another above 80% in the quarter. And that even includes a 70 basis point drag from forward integration. I'm not going to repeat all about what I said about the gross margin back in June in Thailand at our investor day. But this journey with a higher and higher gross margin has been a testament to the structural efficiencies that we have been able to drive in our crafting and supply facilities, combined with gradually driving our prices up. So there's no one-off behind this record high gross margin. It is simply a reflection of a strong brand and our ecosystem that Alexandra went through just before. Separately here in the table, you can also see that our working capital once again improved relative to last year. And this was mostly held by solid inventory management because our inventory in absolute terms were flat despite the 15% growth in revenue. And it's quite a nice achievement. Finally, I would like to highlight that our leverage remains low at 1.4 times and is following the usual seasonal pattern. On that note, you should remember that leverage will peak in Q3 probably just above 1.5 times before then dropping back in Q4 towards a targeted 1.2 times leverage level by the end of the year. Next slide, please. Now, let's take a closer look at the revenue performance in the quarter. Alexander has already commented on the first bucket in the bridge here. The like for likes all covers the other elements. As you can see on the bridge, we saw a continued positive contribution from network expansion reaching 6% in the second quarter. That's a great progress, of course, and it comes with quite attractive EBIT margins. So we continue to be very excited by the opportunities in this space going forward. We also saw a small one-point impact from the sell-in and other, as we call it. That is pure phasing, pure timing. And in this quarter, it was largely related to the sell-in impact we had to our partners when we launched our new Pandora Essence collection. And I'm sure that some of you would have calculated that in aggregate, this bucket sill has been a tailwind for the first half around 1.5%. And given the still uncertain environment, we do not extrapolate that going forward and still expect that to be around 0% for the full year as it stands. So please keep that in mind for your models in the second half of the year when you think through the organic model. This is of course already reflected in our new organic growth guidance. On the EBIT margin, our performance played out exactly in line with our expectations. You remember that back in the Q1 announcement, I said that the margins could be down up to 100 basis points in this quarter, and we came in 40 basis points down. And that 40 basis point drop in the EBIT margin is basically just the net drag from the forward integration in the quarter. And that's the two building blocks on the slide here that sits outside of the dotted box. And as you can see in the bridge, without this, the EBIT margin would have been flat versus last year. And that flat EBIT margin is despite all the significant investments that we're making across the value chain. And you've noticed that our marketing expenses alone were up 100 basis points of sales in the quarter as we continue to invest in the restaging of the brand. As you can see in the bridge, the margin is held by the positive operating leverage that we saw from both network expansion and like for like. And then that offsets inflation and the investments that we're doing in the business. So now let's move on to the guidance update on slide 28. As Alexander mentioned, we have increased our organic growth guidance to 9 to 12 percent from 8 to 10 percent before. And within this, you will see that we have increased our like-for-like guidance to five to seven, up from four to six previously. And this means that the like-for-like guidance is now actually above the CAGR range of four to six percent that we gave at the Capital Market Day in London in October last year. The organic growth range here in 2024 is obviously also well above the 7% to 9% CAGR target that we set out at the CMD last year. So it is a testament to the strong start that we have had to the second chapter of our Phoenix journey so far. So I just want to give a few pointers on the 5% to 7% like-for-like range. So far, we've delivered 11% like-for-like growth in Q1 and 8% here in Q2. So just around 9% for the first half of 2024. And I'm sure that most of you have calculated that the like-for-like guidance therefore implies a low to mid single-digit like-for-like in the second half of the year. And let's call that 2% to 5% like-for-like. The low end of that implied growth of around 2% does indeed look low relative to what we have been delivering. However, we want to once again just stress and highlight that the uncertain external environment we are operating in right now, and therefore the low end accounts for a potential weakening of the macroeconomic backdrop relative to where we are now. We believe that the high end of the implied growth, around 5% like-for-like in the second half, would be quite a fantastic outcome in this environment. As Alexander mentioned, our brand remains in very good shape. We continue to push ahead with our strategic initiatives, and we have started the third quarter well with our underlying like-for-like trends remaining at mid-single-digit levels. However, you remember that nearly 40% of our revenue comes in Q4, so there remains a lot of hard work ahead. Another way to think about the second half of the year is to think about what it looks like on a two-year stacked basis. The implied like-for-like growth on a two-year basis would be around 11% to 14% in the second half of the year. And that compares to the 10% that we have delivered in the first half. So the implicit guidance is that the two-year stack will be up to around four percentage points of acceleration on a two-year stack. So again, we believe that this will be quite a great outcome for the year. So overall, we've had a great first half. We started the second half in very good shape as well. That's a reflection of the good brand momentum. But against this, the macro environment remains challenging. And so overall, we believe the guidance strikes the right balance between those factors. Then please go to the margin guidance on slide 29. On the EBIT margin, we are keeping it unchanged at around 25%. And again, the message is pretty consistent from our side. We continue to invest in growth while maintaining our very solid EBIT margin. If you compare this bridge on the slide here with last quarter, you will see that the higher revenue growth is driving a bit more operating leverage. But this is then offset by 50 basis points of more headwind on commodities and FX. And that's mainly FX driven. My message from Q1 on the phasing of the margins through the year still holds as well. So we do expect the third quarter margin to be down slightly versus last year. And then the Q4 margin will be up. And finally, I just want to circle back to a topic we have discussed with many of you during the last couple of months, and that's the impact of the higher silver prices on our long-term margin target for 2026, which we communicated at the CMD last year. And as you probably know, the target is an EBIT margin of 26% to 27% in 2026. And as I'm sure you're aware, the silver price has increased to around $27 per ounce as of now, which is almost a $4 increase since we announced our targets last year. When that's combined with the latest gold prices and foreign exchange rates, it represents a 140 basis points headwind to our EBIT margin target in 2026. So 140 basis points of headwind is not insignificant, and we've spent quite some time looking into actions to offset that headwind. And we're happy to confirm that thanks to, among others, pricing and a number of cost initiatives, we can confirm the EBIT margin target of 26% to 27% in 2026. And of course, silver price volatility is not uncommon, so we'll continue to monitor this as always and look into further actions if need be. And with that, I'll hand it back to Alexander.

Thanks, Anders. So, to conclude on everything, I want to first reiterate that we are operating in a challenging consumer environment. Our progress this year so far speaks volumes about the execution of our strategy, and I'm convinced that this will continue to yield benefits in the years to come. At the core of everything, we're transforming the perception of the Pandora brand, and it is working. We've delivered very strong growth in the first half of the year. This is tied to the investments we're making and seeing good returns from. And finally, we look ahead with confidence, but remain prudent given the backdrop. And on that note, I think we can open for the Q&A.

Thank you. If you have a question, please press five star on your telephone keypad. If you wish to withdraw it again, you may do so by pressing five star again. We will have a brief pause while questions are being registered. The first question is from Ben Radda-Martin from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead. Your line will now be unmuted.

Perfect. Good morning. Good morning, Alexander, Anderson, Bilal. Thanks very much for the question today. I've had two, please. The first was just on the July trading commentary, that mid-single digit, like for like. I wonder if you can maybe talk about how that differs between the key regions. And then the second one is just on some of the offsets for the commodity pressures that you guys are seeing. Can you maybe talk about, I guess, the timing and the size of the offsets versus that 140 basis point headwind you've called out today, interested between the buckets of pricing space and costs as you spoke to back in June? Thank you.

I'll take the first one. Thanks for the question. So no major changes. We don't usually provide regional commentary by the month, but no major changes by the region versus broadly what we've seen year to day. Of course, every quarter will have pluses and minuses, but over a short period of time, you can read the trends as quite consistent from our side.

And then to your other question, Ben, about the mitigating actions, it essentially boils down to a bit of pricing and a number of additional cost actions that we are looking into. And the way to think about it is that the majority of the impact of the mitigating actions is on the pricing side. So just on the cost side, when the targets that we've set out for 2026, already back in at the Capital Market Day last year, already assumes that we keep driving efficiencies every year. So what we have been looking at is at what... Is there something that we can do on top of that? And we've taken quite a hard look at that during the last couple of months. And there's no one big silver bullet in it, but there's something across point of sales materials. There's something about labor costs. We can keep being smarter and smarter at that. Some of you will know that we have spent money on building a new workforce management system, and that can help us. drive that cost bucket better and better. So I think we have something on procurement in general where we see a couple of opportunities. So a broad package, if I can call it that. And then we see some additional opportunities on pricing. And that's over and above what we expected. guided at the capital market day back in October last year. Just as a reminder, we said 1% to 2% of price increases every year back at the capital market day, and we can do a bit better on that from two angles, really both maybe a bit more on price increases in general, but also we see that the elasticity assumption that we put behind the guidance last year is a bit better than what we assumed. The guidance that we made back at the CMD last year assumed elasticity of one. And with the brand strengthening, with the brand metrics going in the right direction, we do, or maybe that's my speculation, but we do see that that leads us to that the elasticity is a touch better. And you all know that the power of elasticity and the difference whether it's one or 0.9 or 0.8. This is an area where the decimals really count.

Great. Thank you. The next question is from Grace Mollie from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead. Your line will now be unmuted.

Hi, good morning. Thank you very much for taking my question. My first one would just be, Anders, on the margins. So I think today, again, in the press release, you've mentioned that you're reiterating the 26 to 27 margin target by 2026, but you're again reiterating that that's back-end weighted. With that in mind, I was just wondering how we should be thinking about 2025 EBIT margins, obviously not expecting you to give any precise guidance at this stage, but just in terms of the puts and takes we should be thinking about on 2025 margins given that 26 to 27 is back end weighted and then my second question I appreciate it's still very early in terms of your read on essence but any colour you could provide in terms of what you're seeing is it an incremental consumer are you seeing switch between different collections like any initial learnings that have perhaps changed your view on the global launch versus the initial pilot test would be very helpful thank you very much

Yeah. Hi, Grace. It's Anders here. I can start off with the first question. I think we'll just repeat what we've said previously, that it is back-end loaded, but I'll think about next year as flat-ish, given that we're seeing the headwind on silver prices and gold prices, for that matter, already starting in Q1 of next year. So flat-ish next year compared to this year.

And on essence, I mean, as you say, it's between four and six weeks. And that's a little bit too short window to make any big conclusions. But so far, I would say what we expected is happening. We can see kind of how the different products within the collections are moving. So there are no surprises there. And in general, a very positive response that we're receiving from the market. But I think it's a little bit early doors to make any conclusions. any major statements. Maybe the next quarter we can provide a little bit more detail. But no, if there were any negatives, I would have picked that up and I don't see any of that happening. So all good.

Okay, thank you. I'll ask you again next quarter.

Thanks very much.

The next question is from the line of Thomas Chauvet from Citi. Please go ahead. Your line will now be unmuted.

Good morning, gentlemen. My first question on the regions and the divergence in regional LFL in each one. I mean, it's quite clear you've got, you've said it, Alexander, you've got strong LFL in markets where you're immature. You asked Germany, you asked Pandora, more mutual LFL in mature market where you have high market share like UK, France. So, or Italy. On that basis, could you come back to the decision to accelerate investments in Japan and Korea you did earlier this year? When does that take off? What's the amount of investment? More importantly, the nature of investment required in any regional challenge you're mindful about considering the difficult experience of the Chinese neighbor, if I can say. Secondly, on gross margin, It looks like nearly half of your gross margin gains in Q2 were due to product mix effects. The fact that PureWebMore is growing much faster than Core and there's a 500-bit gross margin differential between the two. What are the main reasons for the gross margin gap beyond average selling price? And if that gap is sustainable given your shift to become that full jewelry brand, what How much gross margin expansion have you factored in between 2020 and 2026 from product mix alone? And just a very quick follow-up on silver and hedging. I think your press release suggested stop hedging at the end of Q2. Was it because silver reached, I think at that time, or? $31 per ounce. Can you explain the logic, financial implication, and whether you've resumed hedging now that silver has fallen over 10% back to $20, $27? Thank you.

Hi, Thomas. I wish you had given me a gold medal landing this quarter. But OK, we'll come back on that next time we see you. And in terms of Korea and Japan, they are a little bit different places. So the focus right now in Japan is to kind of shore up a little bit our network. So that's probably the main focus. And then gradually we'll invest a bit more in marketing. But that's probably within kind of the envelope. So there's no major things for us to report as yet. And Korea, we've just kind of sorted out our distribution set up there. So that will put some money. But again, that was within, let's say, the budget that we had expected for the year. So no major, major pushes there. So that's going to be, let's say, a gradual comeback in those places as well. But I think that the first point was secure the physical presence, and then we move with some marketing. We've already done some. We have signed up some of the top K-pop artists, etc. So there is some activity actually happening there.

Thanks, Thomas. I'll take the other two, two and a half questions, if I can call to that. I'll start with the half one on the silver prices. So on the hedging, it's true that I think it's come out as stopped hedging, but we paused further hedging. So we still have hedging in place. So we have hedged basically all of 2024 already, just to make that clear. So we've stopped further hedging for a couple of months. And some of the reasoning in that, even though we've been hedging on autopilot for... And that's been two exceptions, at least in the more than six years I've been here. One was in March 2020, when the pandemic hit and the silver price dropped to 14, 15 from memory, 14, maybe even lower. And then there's been now for a couple of months where the silver price went to $30 or above. So a couple of reflections on that. We only do this in circumstances where we believe that it's exceptional. Of course, you can argue that then you're sort of making that judgment against the market. But we have had discussions with quite a number of experts in the area that on net-net believe that it was exceptional. I think, oh, well, the silver prices have then come down since that from the $30 level to now the $27 level. And then adding to that rationale is that it's actually super expensive to hedge silver. If I want to hedge one year out, it costs me $1.3 per ounce, so almost 5% of the spot price. That's just how it is. But we think when the silver price looked expensive, $30 per ounce, and it will cost $101.3 to hedge, that combination felt a little bit too much to swallow. So since then, when the silver price went down last week, we have hedged one more month out when it was at $26.5, just around a week ago, something like that. So we will come back and start hedging again at a point in time around these levels, but we haven't just started it as of yet. Then on the gross margin, you're right that product mix is a decent part of the 1.7 points bucket that we have in our bridge called pricing, efficiencies and other. And I think in broad terms, the way to think about that, 170 basis points is a 90 basis point. I'm looking at my colleagues here. A 90 basis point of product mix, 30 basis points of cost efficiencies, and then the remaining 50 being pricing. That's give and take how to think about it. So going forward, we have of course baked in product mix into our 26 thinking as well. So and now that we've been out just now to confirm the the 2026 targets doing a bit more on the pricing side. You should think about that. That's another way of saying that we do think that the gross margin being above 80% is sustainable.

Thank you.

The next question is from the line of Anthony Cherchevji from BNP Paribas. Please go ahead. Your line will now be unmuted.

Thank you. Good morning. It's Anthony Cherchevji from BNP Paribas. First of all, well done for the strong result. Just two questions on my side. Would you be able to comment on the EVOC 2.0 project? store concept performance in Q2? I mean, if you can compare it with other stores. And my second question would be if you can give us a bit more detail on the performance of Mexico and Turkey when you say that they are normalizing. I think Mexico was up like a single digit previous quarter, but can you comment maybe on that? on the performance of this big market for you. Thank you.

On the Evoke side, you're right, I think that's probably the background for your question, is that we haven't put it in writing in the company announcement, but net-net, we're still repeating the message from last quarter that we see a small pickup in like-for-like in the stores that we have opened. just as planned, so it's going well. We could be a little bit more specific when we have even more data going further down the road, but you should not expect that EVO drives a massive lift up in like for like, and just repeating what we've said before, The existing format is already super efficient. So we are comping. Evoke 2.0 comes in replacing an already really productive stall environment. But same message from back in Q1.

Yeah. And if we then look at the numbers that we spoke about, I mean, especially, I mean, Turkey with this hyperinflation and now they're starting to try to curb that, of course. So which does have an impact. So we were, I think, only up, what is it, 73 percent. which is still something, but that will normalize down to a different level, of course, now that Erdogan has decided to actually act on this inflation situation. And Mexico is down, I think, two points-ish negative in the quarter, and that's to a large degree negative. because the competitive environment in terms of promotions have been brutal in Mexico, and we haven't necessarily followed that step by step. So then we've taken this a little bit on the chin. But that was somehow expected that Mexico would be moderating a little bit. So that's that.

Thank you. The next question is from Jarell Dedania from RBC. Please go ahead. Your line will now be unmuted.

Hi, good morning. Thank you for taking my question as well. I'd just like to come back to the price increases, if possible, please. Could you elaborate on what gives you confidence your customers will continue to absorb consistent price increases? Could you quantify the level of additional pricing you intend to take above the guided 1% to 2% given at the CMB to 2026? And I guess the context of my question is just because in other consumer verticals, such as luxury goods and staples, there appears to be some pushback where too much pricing has been taken in recent years, and that's now affecting negatively the volumes in those verticals. That was my first question. Yeah, that's the main one. Thank you.

So first of all, whatever pricing we do, as we've spoken about this in the past, we have run pre-testing. So maybe contrary to my luxury peers, I don't know, but we do quite a bit of testing before anything to understand the elasticities involved. The other thing which I will say is also the model of most of the other companies that I'm sure you're covering. Part of their growth algorithm has been very much based on actually taking quite a bit of pricing in order to drive revenue. And as you know, we have said that that's not part of how we think about our business. This is a volume business. So we've been super careful on this and that's the reason we put this whole mechanism of actually pre-testing our pricing levels. We will take a little bit more than the two that we've guided. Right now, we're still working through what that is. Some markets, it will be a little bit less and some a little bit more. But it's going to be something above the 2% range that we have done in the past. And honestly, every time we've done it in the last, what is it, three years, Those elasticities that we have predicted is exactly what's been the outcome. So we are very confident that this thing is going to hold. And of course, there are a few strategic parts of the assortment that we do not touch. So we will still protect opening price points because that is very much what defines also the value proposition of Pandora. There are other aspects in our assortment where we know that there's more freedom to move the pricing around a little bit. But you should not misconstrue this for Pandora now all of a sudden changing the business model on pricing being a revenue driver. This is not the reason we're doing it and it's not going to change. So I hope that gives you a flavor of what we're doing.

Yes, it does. So maybe just to follow up, if silver prices come down or the inflationary pressures across the business start to ease, does that suggest in the future that perhaps the pricing strategy will then ease on the back of that because pricing is used as a mechanism to protect margins as opposed to drive revenues?

We said way back when, when inflation started to be of more significance, then we said this 1% to 2% annually was there purely to offset inflationary pressures in the P&L so that we didn't have to take some of the operating leverage that we get from the growth and had to cover for that in order to maintain margins as a minimum. So that strategy has not changed. But again, if you listen to the macroeconomists, I think nobody's suggesting we're going to come back to the kind of low interest rate and low inflation scenario that we were used to in the prior years before the pandemic and all of this. So I do expect that there's going to be a slightly higher inflationary pressure for the years to come. For all intents and purposes, that one to two is probably what you should expect if you think about it from a modeling standpoint to maintain in your models.

Thank you. The next question is from Andre Tormann from Denske Bank. Please go ahead. Your line will now be unmuted.

Yes, thanks for taking my questions. The first is regarding the elasticities that you also mentioned. And I just wonder if you can give any more flavor around it, how much better it is than the one you assumed at the CMD. That's the first question. The second question is in terms of growth in Germany. And I wonder if you can give some flavor of how we should see this in the second half. I realize you don't guide explicitly on it, but I realize that the comps are getting tougher. So how much lower should growth be would be great. Thanks.

Hi, I'm Andre. It's Anasi, and welcome to the universe of Pandora Analyst. I guess this is your first call. On the elasticity, we have some indications on what we've been doing for the last six to 12 months that elasticity is better. I would be a bit hesitant to be more precise as of now. I'd like to get a little bit more trading under the under the skin but we've seen on average that it's a bit better than 1.0 it's not all markets and of course because the macro situation is different across different markets but on average it's a little bit better than the 1.0 and again the decimals counts here when you translate that into an EBIT margin but yeah so I think I'll leave it there.

Yeah. We do not guide on individual countries and individual quarters. And in this case with Germany on top of that, that's been, you know, when they grew 20%, I was saying, okay, this is going to come down next quarter. And then they came in with 30% and then it's kind of kept on going. So we have an enormously strong momentum in Germany. And at one point, of course, you start meeting those comps. We have some steep comps in the back half. So that growth that we posted in the first half will come down. But how much, I will not comment on here. Because, by the way, I might be completely wrong as well. So, yeah, I'll leave it at that. Sorry for not being more helpful.

Thank you so much.

The next question is from Martin from Lotte. Please go ahead. Your line will now be unmuted.

Hi, thank you very much for taking my questions. I have three quick ones, if I may. The first one is actually on essence. I guess if we isolate the sellout data and try to reverse engineer it in sort of the launch period, that would be still around 3% of sales, if my math is almost accurate. Can you maybe just tell me how that works? Is that sort of an acceleration? from very low to a higher level through the quarter, and maybe also how that has looked in the early days of Q3. That would be very helpful. And then two just market questions. One would be here in Q3, the like for like that you have mentioned, how much support have you received in France, for example, from the Olympics that you have been sponsoring and part of? And also in Germany, have you seen any excess traffic from the Euro games being there? And then just the last question is in the US, which has decelerated sequentially both over a one and two year stack. And just, you know, help me a little bit, maybe understand what a potential catalyst could look like for changing this trend. Could that be essence or anything else as we are looking at the tougher comps? That would be very helpful. Thank you.

OK, let's see if we can knock them off one by one. So essence, I mean, with a four to six weeks, it is it is a difficult question to because it's different by country. But your three percent is is broadly a good math. Let's come back in the next quarter and I'll give you a bit more meat on that bone. And again, we will not comment on current trading other than group numbers. So I'm sorry for that. Germany, Eurogames, no, not really. Like for like, you said Q3. Okay, so the Olympics. So essentially what we've seen is, I mean, we've had an okay start. What happened in Paris, which is kind of where you have the big volumes of the games, of course, the Parisians, they left the city and then were replaced by tourists. So, you know, you gained some and you lost some. So on balance, it's probably not a major, neither positive or negative exercise for us. And then your deceleration in the U.S., Now, I think the real underlying healthy kind of growth for the U.S. is in the kind of range of what we delivered in Q2. You know, it's difficult to grow a heck of a lot more in the current context in the U.S. So I think the kind of move between Q1 and Q2, you'll probably find more of the explanation in the base from last year. But sitting there around that level, I think, is a sensible move. view. And a catalyst to that, I mean, you know, 5% means that we're probably five points ahead of the market at least. So we're happy with that. So maintaining that is a very, very good outcome for us. We continue to invest. On all cylinders in the U.S., we keep investing in marketing. We keep investing in store expansion, forward integration. We keep bringing the diamond. There's more diamond assortment coming. We launched Essence. So it's kind of the same mix that we do elsewhere, but, of course, with a very high focus on execution in the U.S. So I think that... It's like if you're looking for a catalyst to move me from 5 to 15, then you should not put that in your numbers because I don't think that's real.

Very clear. Thank you, Alexander.

The next line we open up for is Lars Toppel from Carnegie. Please go ahead. Your line will now be unmuted.

Thanks and congrats for the spectacular quarter. Once again, I have two questions, please. One is just to be absolutely certain I understand your current trading comments correctly. So you're saying the first six weeks of the quarter, you had a momentum that is higher than mid-single-digit, so let's call it high single-digit. but you think the underlying run rate is mid-single-digit. Would that mean, if that continued, I should think of Q3 as first half of the quarter, high single-digit, second half of the quarter, mid-single-digit? I know you're not guiding for what it might look like for the rest of the quarter, but is that a fair interpretation? And then question number two goes to... Lab-grown diamonds, where you have an 88% like-for-like, which of course is a very high number, but you have also introduced it into more markets. So if you look at markets where it also was in the same quarter last year, what would the like-for-like then be? And then just a final question on essence of the... Essence product you sold into the channel, I assume some of those were also sold out. So I wonder if you can give an approximate number for the total sellout of Essence in the quarter. Thanks.

So I'll take the first one, Lars, and thanks for the questions. So your thought process is broadly correct in terms of momentum. Clearly, within the three months, things will and can fluctuate between them. But broadly speaking, your thought process is correct in how we see the quarter playing. And most importantly, how we see the phasing playing out in absolute terms. I think that's a fair representation.

Good. Then on essence, the way we look at this as a share of business type of metric, to say something, and it's what we told Martin on the previous question, it's been roughly 3% of the share of business, which is a representation of the sellout number. And of course, if you purely look at the revenue number, there is a bit of selling in that. So the 3% share business is a more accurate way to think about it. But again, and I want to stress that it's four to six weeks, guys. This will take a little bit of time. Still, we're very happy with the first phase of this. And then your diamond question that we probably need to get back to you. I don't have this in my head exactly how that, unless somebody can help me here. Yeah.

I can look it up while I speak, but the way to think about the like-for-like for lab-grown diamonds is that it is a U.S. number, basically a North American number, because by far the majority of that business is in North America. So those two numbers would essentially be the same, so the 88 and the North American number. But I'll check while I move on with the Q&A.

Okay, I actually have one more question, please, which goes on your implied guidance for H2. So you said on the call it's 2% to 5% like-for-like. It's 4% to 9% organic, which basically means the net contribution from network, etc., should only be 2% to 4%. It has been significantly higher in H1. Is that because you're conservative or do you see any sort of hard facts that should cause a deceleration for the network contribution to 2% to 4% for H2?

Good question, Lars. So two points to that. You're absolutely right. 4% to 9% is the implied organic growth guidance at the starting point. Anders did mention that the sell-in impact of roughly a percent and a half in the first half For now, we expect that to balance out in the second half, so we expect 0%. So you have to take that off of that implied organic as a starting point. But then your question on network, where we've given specific guidance of around 4% to 5%, having delivered around 5% in the first half of the year. That implies roughly 3% to 5% on the roundings in the second half of the year. You are right that the 3%... is conservative, ultimately. We don't see anything right now as we stand. That gravitates us towards the 3%. Obviously, some of our openings are towards the year-end. We do annualise our openings from last year as well, in Q4. You remember, you were back-end loaded last year. So it's a bit of cautiousness, but you're absolutely correct. As it stands right now, we don't see us moving towards the low end of that network range, but we like to be prudent.

Fantastic. Thank you, guys, for taking my question. Congrats again for the good corner.

Thank you. We got a gold from Tom Lars.

Let's move on to the next question from Christian Godiksen from SEB. Please go ahead. Your line will now be unmuted.

Thank you. But then I also have to give you a gold medal then, I guess.

Thank you.

But yeah, congrats for the good results. But a couple of questions from my side. First of all, could you maybe comment a bit on the current pricing environment you're seeing? Obviously, we've seen some competitors out saying that we have a fairly high promotional level. And then in that regard, what is your view on your confidence in being able to raise prices further in such an environment? That will be the first question. And then on the second question, on maybe a bit more, if you could give some more flavor on the Be Love campaign that attracts new customers to the Pandora brand. And then if you could comment on the share of business for how that is different for the new customers in terms of collections, if you would, more versus moments. And maybe also how much new customers New consumers make up a revenue compared to one, two years ago. And then maybe thirdly, interested in obviously China is not performing very well, but just wondering whether there was any takeaways already now from David getting to know the market somewhat better, whether he had some views would be interesting. Thank you.

Okay, on the pricing environment, I mean, what we've seen is, I would say, an elevated both depth and length. And this can vary market by market, but generally speaking, we see that there's a little bit of a higher pressure in the key trading moments. So during Mother's Day, during end of season sale, and those type of events. We don't necessarily, I mean, there are some exceptions to what I'm saying. In Mexico, they've kind of held on and promoted for much, much longer. But generally speaking, and let's say in the maturer markets, then we would see that people are in the key consumption periods. And then they're not heavy on promotion in between. But they might extend these, and we call them KCPs. But again, I come back on the confidence point. We've pre-tested what we intend to do. And since we've had three successful runs at it, that kind of builds our confidence. That's probably the way it is. When it comes to Be Love, there are a couple of metrics in terms of we're trying obviously to understand if there's an impact on the brand. And the easiest way to say is, well, there was 8% like for like, so that's something. We're building market share in every market, even if the revenue number isn't great or positive, let's say, then we can see that our delta to the market is positive in all markets. And then specifically on the brand, we can see that we have moved metrics like unaided brand awareness is up, brand penetration is up, customer acquisition is up. I'm not detailing those numbers. I think that's too sensitive information. But you can rest assured that all the brand metrics have moved in a significant way. You know, sometimes you get movements on these type of numbers, which is outside of confidence level. But here we can safely say that all the key brand metrics are moving in a very positive direction on the basis of B-Love. So we're very, very pleased with that program. Was there another one? China. China. Any feedback from David? Yeah, I think so he's been essentially busy structuring the organization somewhat differently, putting a bit of the Pandora DNA when it comes in particular in the stores. So the selling ceremony has been a big thing. We've tried to rejig a little bit the merchandising approach. And then one important thing that he has done, which obviously puts a drag on an already kind of bad number, is that we need to wean off some of the promotional intensity that we've had on the business, which is not unusual. When you're under pressure, then you start doing something. Maybe a little bit too much of that. So we're taking that out step by step. So I think those are the main pieces that are kind of concrete enough. And there's a ton of other things as well. But those would be probably for this forum of interest to talk about.

Okay, perfect. Thanks. Just maybe just one quick follow-up in terms of the BELOV campaign. Could you maybe just comment a bit on maybe the behavior of new customers coming into the brand versus existing customers? Are there any changes in behavior or any differences in behavior?

Then the behavior we could somehow track with a bit more accuracy would be to look at the transactional information. So average basket, UPT and those kind of metrics. There's nothing particular there. Maybe what we see, but this is Essence, so which I don't know how relevant that is given that it's quite short, but we can see that the ASP on Essence purchases offsets UPT. So let me explain that. So when somebody comes in and buys charms, they typically don't just buy one charm. They would, on average, be buying two charms. So let's say you buy two charms for 300 kroner apiece, then your basket is 600 kroner, which is somewhere in the range of our global average. The average price on a piece of essence would actually even be a touch higher than that basket, which means that I'm losing something on the UPT, but as a basket value, I'm actually in a good place. Because that could always be the fear when you move into, let's say, finished jewelry where this... collectability element is a lot less stronger. But so far we are not experiencing that. And that's probably also true for the timeless business. So if that's to say something. Other than that, when we look at kind of the customer profile in terms of age on average with kind of behind the Phoenix strategy is not changing that much. We're still, you know, it's the same profile as what we have seen in the past, largely speaking. So there's nothing that kind of sticks out necessarily. I think in the past we've spoken a little bit about that the timeless rings seem to be a good recruitment tool for younger audiences. So Gen X over-indexes on rings, for instance. So that's one. But that's probably the only one that really is somewhat different in my mind.

Okay. I was more referring to the Be Love campaign in general. whether that consumer attraction, whether those new consumers coming into the brand, whether there was any difference to them compared to the the existing consumers, but it seems to be fairly much nothing material.

Yeah, and for me, that's not surprising, given that we have such a wide audience already in there today. So we would have to have a big, big overindex on a particular audience for this to kind of hit the radar here. So if your brand is more niched, I think then that you would see movements easier like that. But I mean, everybody's a customer to Pandora from 15 to 65 somehow. And we have a quite normalized distribution curve of our customer base. So nothing major there.

Perfect. Thank you. Congratulations for the gold.

Thank you. We appreciate it.

As there are no further questions in the queue, I will hand the word back to the speakers for closing remarks.

Well, thank you, everybody, for participating. And of course, those of you that were in Thailand as well. I know it's a big, big effort. So we appreciate that. Hope that was useful for you. We also appreciate the three golds and one silver that we collected in this meeting. Much, much appreciated. We feel very good about the last quarter and we've raised the guidance. So hopefully that should show a sign of confidence. It's not an easy market context, as we all know. So in that backdrop, I'm very, very pleased with how the strategy is delivering. And on that note, we'll close for today and see you out there. Thank you very much.