[Foreign language] . Good morning. It is my great honor to welcome you to the Investor and Analyst Day 2024 at Pandora Crafting and Supply here in Bangkok, Thailand. This is the heart of rich craftsmanship of the world's largest jewelry brand, Pandora. Before we commence the first session, please allow me to introduce the speakers at the presentations. In order of appearance, may I introduce Anders Boyer, Chief Financial Officer, Pandora; Ossie Jeerasage Puranasamriddhi, Chief Supply Officer and Managing Director, Pandora; Joyce Lam, Vice President for Innovation and Product Development, Pandora Crafting and Supply; Mads Twomey-Madsen, Senior Vice President, Global Communications and Sustainability, Pandora. May I also introduce Pandora's team? First, from the Investor Relations and Communications team, Bilal Aziz, Adam Fussing, Andreas Christensen, Matilda Munkhammar-Lantto.
And we also have joining us here, Natasha Lau, Senior Vice President, Commercial Finance, Pandora; Christian Krüger, Vice President, Finance, Pandora Crafting and Supply; Howard Bruno, Vice President, Crafting and Supply Quality; Gulashat Tharajan, Vice President, Plant Head AAA; Luciano Oliveira, Vice President, Plant Head BBB; and Lars Nielsen, who you'll see tomorrow, the Vice President, Plant Head of Lamphun. Joining us here today are also the strategy team, and also here are your group leaders for the Day One Tours. Now, please join me in welcoming Anders Boyer, Chief Financial Officer, Pandora, on the stage for the welcome and introduction to Pandora and its business model. Anders, please.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you very much. Good morning, everyone. A very, very big welcome to Thailand and our state-of-the-art crafting facilities here. I hope that your travels here have gone well, that you're not too jet-lagged. If you are, then don't worry, it's only going to get worse during the day, I'm pretty sure. We'll do our best to keep you entertained and energized. Also, a very big thank you to our host, Khun Ossie, and the team. You know, Ossie, it's always such a pleasure for me to be here. Today and tomorrow is going to be the case as well. Most of the two days, today and tomorrow, will be about experiencing the facilities yourselves, seeing what happens here in Thailand with your own eyes, because that's kind of why we are here.
But we will start out with a couple of presentations during the morning just to set the scene. Some of you will remember that last year when we had the CMD in London, we only had a crafting presentation in a breakout room, so a pretty short presentation. And we intentionally left out a formal presentation in the main room because we think that in order really to understand what Pandora is doing in Thailand, you need to be here. So for the next 20 minutes or so, I'll start out by explaining what makes Pandora unique and what our competitive advantage really is, trying to put a few more words on that, and then also explain what is the role of crafting and supply in forming the competitive edge of our company. Now, if I can change the slides, just going one back. There we go.
Before I get into the business model and our competitive edge, I'll just take a step back and remind all of us on the bigger picture of our strategy. At the CMD last year, we announced that our Phoenix Strategy that we launched back in 2021 is working quite well. As a result, we moved ahead with the next chapter on our journey, which is about trying to accelerate growth even more. Because simply put, that's what we have been doing since we launched the strategy back in 2021 is working quite well. Therefore now, during the second chapter of the strategy, we're just continuing along the same path, increasing investments in current and future growth while we are attempting to restate the brand to be known as a full jewelry brand and accelerate growth.
With a market share of less than 2%, that's quite a lot to run for. We will continue to see the building blocks of the Phoenix Strategy to drive growth also beyond 2026, which is kind of the formal timeframe for the Phoenix Strategy. Even beyond that, the building blocks are going to keep driving top-line growth. At the core of the Phoenix Strategy is the mission that we have to change the perception of Pandora into a full jewelry brand. Through the investments in elevating brand desirability, the goal is to stretch the brand a little bit, slightly, in order for it to appeal across all usage occasions and all of our collections. Of course, while we stay firmly as an accessible brand, that ain't going to change.
But simply put, what we would like to end up with is that if a consumer is looking for a piece of branded, handcrafted, precious metal jewelry at an accessible price, we would like them to think, yeah, Pandora, that's the brand for me. Broadly speaking, we already have the products, not least now that we have launched the Essence collection a few weeks back. It's mainly about changing the perception of the brand. All right. There you go. This is the strategy reel that we presented at the CMD in London last year. It's also the one that we update you on in our quarterly announcements. As you know, the strategy centers around the four growth pillars that you have in the pink circle in the middle, being about the brand, design, personalization, and markets.
We've spoken about these pillars at quite some detail at the CMD last year and also every quarter. This is not the topic for today. The message that we would like you to take away or just repeat is that we have multiple growth opportunities. Just keep doing what we're doing and have been doing since we launched the strategy back in 2021. We don't need all of these growth pillars to succeed in order to deliver on our target. Another key message more relevant for today and tomorrow is that a critical enabler behind this strategy is, of course, that we are able to craft high-quality jewelry on time and at a low cost. That is what we will be diving into during today and tomorrow. I probably have to do this twice. Sorry. I'm not very well at this. There you go.
All right. You probably all remember this, the financial algorithm of Pandora and what the investment case looks like. We've added this slide from the CMD last year just as a reminder. At the CMD last year, we announced new 3-year targets. Those targets, they start to the left on the slide up here with the high single-digit annual organic growth, and then combines with high gross margins in the second black box and high EBIT margins in the third black box. Then when you combine that with our high cash generation and our cash return policy, you get to what is stated in the last black box, being that we can drive an earnings per share growth in the mid- to high teens over the next couple of years. Our crafting facilities play a key role in delivering on this financial algorithm.
Of course, the crafting facilities play a key role in the second black box here, being the high gross margins. But they also play a key role in the high cash generation and the return on invested capital that we are generating. Because the crafting facilities that we have are actually not that capital-intensive, and partly because our jewelry is handcrafted to a fairly large extent. So you will see that we don't have a big machine standing here in Thailand, in Lamphun, where it's just sort of spitting out the jewelry, and then we turn volume up and down depending on demand. So the way to think about it, the role of the crafting facilities in this algorithm could be like this. A few weeks back in May, we announced the groundbreaking at our new facility in Vietnam.
That facility will add 50% capacity at a total capital expenditure of around $150 million, $150 million. Let's call that DKK 11 billion. So that means that we only need to invest around 3% of revenue in order to increase capacity by 50%. So another way to put that is that at our scale, the impact of depreciations in our cost of goods sold, the cost, is very low, resulting in that our cost of goods sold is almost fully variable. And in a simple way, and maybe it's too simplified, and I apologize for that, but in a simple way, you can say that the investment in Vietnam is only equivalent to around one month of gross profit generated by the revenue at full capacity at the factory. That is a very asset-light business model.
So now that brings me nicely on to talk on the next couple of slides about the Pandora Ecosystem. One of the questions we often get is that, what is exactly in the Pandora business model that enables you to deliver on the algorithm that are in the black boxes that I just went through? We get questions, so how can you operate with a gross margin of around 80%? How can you keep operating with EBIT margins in the mid-20s%? Why can you operate with a ROIC, return on invested capital, of 45%? And the answer is that it's all simply a function of the ecosystem we have built up over the last couple of decades. And it all starts with the brand. The brand is the core reason for the scale that we have in the business.
The brand is the core reason why we can operate with the scale that we have in a physical store. The brand is the core reason we operate as a store, on average, with more than 40% EBIT margin. Pandora is the most well-known jewelry brand in the world, and most of you know that. That's great. It's valuable in itself. It's not easy to replicate, not easy to copy. But what is even more valuable for the company is the fact that Pandora owns the space of jewelry with a meaning in the minds of consumers. That is even more difficult to copy. That brand equity has been built up hand in hand with the Moments platform. It takes decades to build up a jewelry icon. Our icon, being the Moments platform, has been built up over the last almost 25 years.
And that platform, that icon, is the foundation for our brand equity. And owning a unique position in the mass market means that we are allowed to play the volume and scale game, so to speak. Last year, the brand drove demand for 107 million pieces of jewelry globally. So how do we leverage this brand-driven scale in order to build a business model that is even harder to replicate? And there's two pieces on top of the brand. First of all, we have invested in and built an unmatched global distribution platform, which is mostly in-house or direct-to-consumer Pandora-operated stores. We have a total of around 6,600 points of sale, of which almost 2,700 are standalone, dedicated Pandora concept stores. Someone else could choose and decide, say, "Well, we want to duplicate the store network." It would take a lot of money.
It would take probably quite a long time. But what you cannot just duplicate is the productivity of the stores, of course. So being the revenue or gross profit per square meter. And that all, obviously, then again, just links back to the brand. The other piece of the puzzle on how we leverage the brand-driven scale to build a business that's hard to replicate is crafting and supply, of course. And that is why we are here. So over the course of the next couple of days, you will see firsthand what we have built and the complexity of being able to mass-produce handcrafted jewelry at the scale that we do here. Over the past years, Pandora has been able to leverage this crafting scale to drive a cost advantage.
For those of you familiar with the Pandora story, you know that our gross margins have always been high. Over the last five years, we have even been able to lift that to the high 70s on gross margin. A lot of that is down to the benefit of what happens here in Thailand. Our in-house crafting and supply facilities allows us to deliver on the brand promise of both high quality on the one hand and affordability at the same time. To summarize, what we have here is a strong ecosystem. It all starts with the brand, which drives demand at an unmatched scale. Around this, we have built a strong infrastructure with in-house crafting on the one hand and in-house, so to speak, distribution platform.
That forms a model which is quite unique in a fragmented and mostly unbranded global jewelry market. We believe that this model yields significant benefits compared to a subscale competitor set. At the same time, it underpins the financial algorithm that I mentioned earlier on. Zooming in a bit on the role of crafting and supply in this ecosystem and our gross margins. Hopefully, this chart should help illustrate that. What we have put up here is the gross margin since 2016. There's two lines up here. The gray line is our historical reported gross margin, as you can find it in the annual report. On the pink line, you'll see the gross margin adjusted for more mechanical or technical factors such as forward integration, channel mix, foreign exchange, and commodity prices.
So the other way to think about it is that the pink line is supposed to represent the underlying gross margin development, and mainly being an effect of the result of ASP development and the cost of production. And you can see how the pink line has been on an upward trend during the last 5 years. And one way to think about it is to look at the pink line in two phases. First, you have 2016, 2017, 2018, where there was quite some ASP pressure due to excessive promotions and a number of other things, but not least excessive promotions, which hurt the gross margin. Then in 2019, as many of you know, the transformation begins. And then through a combination of detoxing the brand and subsequently raising prices and keep working with lower and lower production costs, you see the positive impact on the gross margin.
I'll zoom into the cost of production just on the next slide. The message we want you to take away here is that there is no one-off factor explaining the increase in the gross margin. It's all about a consistent and sustainable story on managing our prices and keep trying to lower our cost of production. That brings me nicely onto the next slide where we are taking a step down or zooming into the average cost of production for each piece of jewelry. Again, here, what we have showed up here is an indexed average cost of production where we have adjusted the numbers for foreign exchange, commodity prices, and product mix in order to give you a view of the underlying development.
You can see here over the last five years or so that we've actually managed to slightly lower the average cost that it takes to produce a piece of jewelry. That's despite the fact that the starting point here in 2019, Pandora was already super efficient. It's not easy to become even more efficient than we already were back in 2019. As you can see here, the cost of production is down a bit per unit, also despite inflation every year and annual salary increases that need to be absorbed. We think this is a great outcome, and it speaks to the infrastructure that we have built, which allows us to drive significant productivity and scale benefits. I know Ossie later on will speak to a bit about how we measure to the decimal of a second on how we produce each piece of jewelry.
So when you combine the picture up here with the ASP progress over the last number of years, you have sort of the ingredients for the gross margin progress that we've seen since 2019. I also wanted to just zoom into the cost of goods sold from a somewhat different angle in order to demonstrate the cost flexibility that we have. What you can see on this chart is that only around 4% of our cost of goods sold are truly fixed. So that's the dark black box to the far right. And this is essentially mostly depreciations. Only 4% is fully sort of fixed cost, even though we are almost producing everything in-house. So this means that we have plenty of flexibility in adjusting the cost of goods sold up and down in line with how much we are selling.
That flexibility underpins the resiliency of our gross margins. This is a gross margin bridge starting from 2023 and then looking ahead. Many of you will remember that at the CMD last year, we said that we expected the gross margin to remain high and even increase. And that's also what has happened in the three quarters that has been announced since the CMD in October last year. So now the question obviously is, how does all of this tie into the future gross margin? And there's a couple of messages on the slide up here. First of all, just repeating, the gross margin will remain high. There's no structural one-off or similar that drives the current gross margin up to almost 80%.
And secondly, as you can see in the black bar just in the middle here, that at unchanged commodity prices, the gross margin would exceed 80% at a point in time. So the third message is that, and that's what you can see on the last part of the bridge up here, that the latest development in silver prices and gold prices, of course, gives some headwind. And as you can see on the chart up here, the increase in silver and gold prices since last year drives a 260 basis points headwind versus last year at the current spot prices. The chart up here does not include any mitigating actions to offset some of that increase in commodity prices. And of course, there will be mitigating actions.
But I can't give you a complete and solid answer yet on exactly how much of the silver and gold impact that we can mitigate. The increase in silver and gold prices have mostly happened during the last, I don't know, eight weeks or so. We need a bit more time in the leadership team to give you a full answer. We are not just looking into mitigating actions on the gross margin level. We're looking across the full P&L to see how far we can get in mitigating that 260 basis points of headwind. We will talk more about that on August 13 when we are announcing the second quarter results. You know that we are building a factory in Vietnam.
Once we are up and running in Vietnam, the cost of producing a piece of silver in Vietnam will be similar to here in Thailand, maybe even a touch slower, but at least sort of maximum similar to here. There will be some ramp-up cost as we get ready to produce in Vietnam. So there will be some ramp-up cost in 2025 next year and 2026. It's not big, big money, but you can think about it as being in the 15-30 basis points of gross margin impact in 2025 and 2026. But again, the key message that we want you to take away on the slide up here is that while there will be random factors that we can't fully control like the silver prices, the fundamental drivers of our gross margins are rock solid.
Wrapping up, what we have at Pandora is a unique ecosystem that is very hard to replicate. We've developed a brand which owns a unique position in the minds of consumers. And around that brand, we have built an infrastructure with crafting at scale in-house and distribution at scale that is also mostly direct to consumers or Pandora retail, Pandora operated store. And that business model drives a very attractive financial model, financial algorithm that you can see illustrated up here. So let's get into the meat of why you are really here. So this is the agenda for today and tomorrow. I think you should have that in your app, the Pandora app already. So I will not walk through it in too great detail. But we have a couple of more presentations in the room here before we break for lunch.
Then after the lunch, we will have the factory tours for the remaining part of the afternoon. Next up is a deep dive into the crafting and supply here in Thailand. Left for me is just to say, once again, a very big welcome to Thailand and a very big welcome on the stage to my dear colleague, Khun Ossie. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much, Anders. Good morning, everyone. A warm welcome to Pandora Crafting and Supply, our world-class crafting facility where we craft dreams into reality. My name is Jeerasage, and please feel free to call me Ossie. I am the Chief Supply Officer here at Pandora. It is our great pleasure to have you joining us here across from all over the globe. We are very, very much looking forward to sharing you our journey of growth together.
Some of you may have already joined us in 2017, when we had a grand opening of our Lamphun plant in the north of Thailand. On the other hand, some of you will be visiting us for the first time. It has been almost seven years since then. There have been many, many impactful events around the world: COVID situations, geopolitical tensions, macroeconomic uncertainties. Even with all this turbulence, and as Anders says, Pandora has come out even stronger. Crafting and supply is one of the key drivers. As we always say, you have to see it to believe it, to see the magnitude and sophistication of our operation, the passion of our people. We have separated the focus of the two days' events for the two locations in the most effective way to use your time. Of course, for your fullest appreciation.
Please always bear in mind that craftsmanship is the heart and soul of Pandora, in which you will duly witness in the two locations. For the first day in Bangkok here, we will focus on the centralized functions, including innovation, product development, quality, laboratory, and of course, our plating operations. As we also will be showing you how we have enhanced our craftsmanship with technologies, automations, and digitalization. While on the second day, we will emphasize on the full end-to-end crafting process, including an exciting workshop for all of you to try your craftsmanship skills. So hopefully that you will be looking forward to that. And then as Anders spoke earlier about what have changed numerically over the past years, let us share with you in a short video to capture a transformation in a physical sense over the seven years what happened at Crafting and Supply. Please enjoy.
I really hope that you enjoy the video summarizing our journey. Now, let me take you a little bit back to the origin of Pandora Crafting and Supply. Why Pandora established our first crafting and supply in Thailand? The country offers a mix of great benefits that the large-scale manufacturer and a brand like Pandora has, and we always continue to enjoy. First, Thailand is in an area with low risk in terms of natural disaster and, of course, global conflicts. Thai society is also very, very peaceful and harmonious. We are the land of smiles. The Thai government also provides great support for foreign investors, such as taxes and duty exemptions. Thailand is one of the few countries where foreign investors could also own a piece of land. In addition, Thailand has always been known for craftsmanship, artistry, attention to details.
Its rich culture, heritage, and tradition promotes Thailand as one of the most important jewelry hubs of the world. Lastly, Thai economy is still growing, and the country's infrastructure is very strong. The country continues to have growing ecosystems for jewelry businesses with a vast number of material suppliers, partners, research, and development institutions. With those benefits, our founder, Per Enevoldsen, fell in love with Thailand and started our operation in 1989. Since then, our Thai operation has been always the heart and soul of Pandora. We have our very first crafting facility in 2005 here in Gemopolis Industrial Estate. As the company grew, we invested more in expanding our footprint. We established our innovation center in 2012 to fuel more innovation and product development capabilities. We then set up the new state-of-the-art greenfield crafting facility in the north of Thailand in Lamphun in 2017.
We then consolidated our crafting facility here in Bangkok to create two world-class manufacturing hubs, AAA for our silver products and BBB for our plated products in 2018. Our investment did not stop there. We expanded our A12, our innovation center, to keep upgrading our capability and also set up our logistics center in the year 2019 and 2020. Besides strengthening our operation, we continuously pursue our sustainability ambition, as Mads will also talk about it a bit later. We have all our facility with 100% renewable energy since 2020, and then we also shifted to 100% recycled silver and gold since December 2023. Now, let's fast forward. We are scaling up to support Phoenix Strategy, fulfilling our ambition as the world's largest jewelry brand and also becoming a full jewelry brand, as well as strengthening our supply resilience.
We now have five productive and effective, flexible energy, including robust and resilient components to form what we call Pandora Crafting and Supply Network. Here in Bangkok, we have our world-class AAA crafting facility for silver products. This site is equipped with what we call flow line finishing concept, maximizing our flexibility and agility. It is really one of a kind, and you will see it very, very soon. In the north of Thailand, we have our sustainable leading Lamphun factory, producing both silver as well as gold items. You will visit this factory tomorrow. Pandora also decided to follow and establish the new facility in Vietnam. The new site will combine our knowledge and experience of the three existing sites, enhancing the latest technology to pave the future of the jewelry manufacturing. The final piece of the jigsaw is also our OEM and our ODMs.
Working closely with our partners across the globe allowed us to balance our capacity and bring innovation now that we're learning to our operations. Just before I forget, I think I skipped over the WB. Our WB plant is also our leading plating factory, equipped with two plating lines to complete end-to-end plating production. So in total, our in-house manufacturing capacity is 110 million pieces today. We will be scaling up to 170 million when Vietnam is up and running in full speed. As Anders mentioned earlier, the Pandora brand allows us to produce this scale that is simply unmatched globally. I would also like to take the chance to update you regarding our new facility in Vietnam. You may ask, why Vietnam? We conducted an extensive research across the globe to identify the location for our new facility.
The team originally identified 27 potential countries across the globe. After thorough analysis, we really concluded to choose Binh Duong Province, which is near to Ho Chi Minh City in the south of Vietnam, as the new location with these reasons. One, Vietnam is also well known for its high craftsmanship skills. This country has a rich cultural background and is renowned for its handcrafted goods. Two, Vietnamese government also actively promotes and supports foreign investors in setting up new manufacturing facilities through a range of incentives and policies. And third, and not the last one, but last but not least, Vietnam has also become an attractive destination for global companies, which is with its economic strength. The country keeps on improving its infrastructures as transportation networks, airports, renewable energies, and other strong basic utility.
Lastly, as Anders touched this point, costs also should be comparable to Thailand, if not slightly below, when running on similar productivity and, of course, loading levels to Thailand. Pandora is investing $150 million in setting up this new state-of-the-art facility by equipping it with the latest crafting processes and technology. Really hoping that you will agree with me that it's a great-looking facility. We are also very happy to tell you that the $150 million that Anders and myself are talking about here is already inside our CapEx financial plan, as communicated in the Capital Markets Day last year. The site will add 60 million jewelry pieces, in which 40 million is silver products, while 20 million will be plated products to further fuel the growth of Pandora.
The site will run on 100% renewable energy and is designed to meet LEED Gold standards to conserve energy and has minimum impact to the environment. As you may also have heard, we had just our groundbreaking ceremony, of course, together with Alexander for our Vietnam crafting facility on the 16th of May. Now, we are starting our construction phase, which will be completed for commissioning in the late 2025. We expect to produce the first pieces coming out from that facility in Q1 2026, as communicated. Now, let us also tell you a little bit about our other Lamphun project. As you might recall, we have another investment in our capacity expansion program in the north of Thailand, which is the first facility right next to our current facility in Lamphun. This facility is designed to supply another 20 million plated products.
But as we have communicated, due to prudent precaution on macroeconomic situations and also risk mitigation, we have put that project on hold so we could focus on our Vietnam facility. The construction site is kept at extremely good condition, ready to reignite when needed. The facility will require 13-16 months to operationalize. This means we can fuel our growth journey quickly if more capacity or even additional risk mitigation is required in the future. Now, let us take a little bit of a deep breath together, and then let me give you more insights to our crafting and supply operation, where we craft dreams into reality. Pandora is the world's largest jewelry brand, and crafting and supply is the foundation of crafting at scale. Last year, we produced 102 million pieces of jewelry in-house.
This scale allowed us to invest in innovation, advanced technology, automation, enhancing quality, efficiency, and speed. This also shares fixed costs across our large volume and helps us maintain high gross margins. To achieve this level of capacity, we employ 12,000 highly skilled craft people who work in harmony under highly efficient processes. This setup ensures each jewelry piece meets our quality standards while maintaining efficiency and also scalability. Lastly, our operating model allows us to adjust our capacity by managing our working time and resources to respond to demand fluctuations. We continuously train our craft people to have multi-skill to support the processes needed. We also have an extensive partner to support us with materials, with components, or even finished goods in case our in-house capacity needs flexibility and agility. Now, for you to understand the full picture, our crafting and supply begins with our consumer-centric designs.
So on that note, let us hear from Stephen Fairchild, our Chief Product Officer, how the global designers in Copenhagen work collaboratively with our crafting and supply to bring aesthetical designs to life. Please enjoy.
Our design philosophy really starts first with our brand purpose, where we give a voice to people's loves. We have created probably the most incredible platform of meaningful jewelry. I think it's always based on art and science. So the science is looking really at the consumer insights, and then looking at the art, it's really looking at culture. That's our really point of difference, is that we make meaningful jewelry that's beautifully handcrafted. I think the consumer is number one because I think that they own our brand. So in a lot of ways, they are driving us forward to constantly innovate and bring them desirable, meaningful jewelry.
There's a lot of steps in making jewelry. We are very collaborative with Thailand because in the end, the outcome of our beautifully handcrafted jewelry is really done with them. So we basically hand-draw our jewelry, and when we feel comfortable with it, this is where Thailand and the crafting facility is so fundamental. They engineer it through CADing. From that, we're able to visualize what we think the outcome of the product will look like. From that, then we go into 3D printing, and then we collectively look at this together to determine if the outcome from the design aesthetic we wanted, from the crafting aesthetic we wanted, is right. And from there, then actually we move into our first prototype, which is actually seeing the amazing part of design, crafting come to an end goal, which makes the most beautiful, meaningful jewelry in the world.
We visit Thailand constantly, and they constantly visit us. What I love that's happened recently is they're taking a lot of initiatives to actually help us even design better products. And that only comes because of relationships. We're on this innovation process collectively, and they are really stepping up to the plate to help us innovate on a constant. I always say the crafting facility in Thailand is the heart and soul of this company. And every single person who touches our product, I truly believe our end consumers feel the love and the meaning that this jewelry gives from the people who've crafted this product.
So let me elaborate a little bit more. We call our process of turning innovation and designs of our product as our brand end-to-end process.
This process begins with inspiration, innovation designs, then turning these ideas into design by our global designers in Copenhagen using hand sketches. Then these sketches will be handed over to our crafting and supply. We will start our 3D computer-aided designs, or what we call CAD, then creating samples by using 3D printing. At this point, we will have the first jewelry sample in the real world. During the development of products, a series of quality assurances on both material and product are being conducted to ensure a very high-quality standard. The next critical and very crucial process is called pre-production. This is where we test, we optimize the way we craft our jewelry so that we can multiply from that 1 piece to that million pieces while optimizing cost, quality, and of course, lead time.
At this stage, we will prepare our highly trained craft people to ensure that they have the right skills to support the mass production. The optimization journey does not stop there. We continue to improve our crafting at scale. As Anders mentioned, the process is never-ending, and we will continue to hunt for more efficiency going forward. And Anders, that's a promise. Once again, I would like to emphasize that the end-to-end, sorry, end-to-end process is not a crafting and supply internal process. All functions across Pandora, ranging from marketing, commercial, designs, product, and retail, play crucial roles. Pandora has a big, big advantage that we own the whole value chain, vertically integrated, allowing crafting and supply, and of course, Pandora to collect all information, then analyze and use the insight to evolve the way we craft our products, and of course, optimizing our EBIT margins.
Behind the effective and efficient processes is our passionate people. They are the most valuable assets. I really hope when you walk inside our facility that you will see that our people are really, really happy and will always wear a big smile. We keep investing in our people. We developed a production academy program to continuously and structurally train our people. With one master trainer, we have 10 trainees to set up, ensure the trainees get close support to bring up their required skill. We also invest in providing above-the-standard benefits to support our employees. For example, besides the wages and salary, Pandora also provides meal allowances, transportation to and from the facility to their home, air conditioning working environments, health and accident insurance, as well as engaging social events both internally and externally to our community.
With all these benefits, we are able to keep our turnover low at approximately 7% versus the over 10% in the market average. This allows us to really keep our skilled people fully engaged and motivated with Pandora and, of course, while attracting new talents. Craftsmanship is the heart of our operation. I keep on repeating that the intricate designs and artistry jewelry crafted by our skilled craft people creates unique value and desirable products to delight our consumers. Pandora has more than three decades of experience in crafting with every attention to details, and we are committed to continue enhancing and mastering our crafting skills. Nevertheless, in today's extremely competitive jewelry industry, while continuing in mastering our craftsmanship, it is so crucial to combine craftsmanship and technology. The mixtures allowed us to create more desirable products while optimizing our cost, quality, and services.
Technology plays a crucial role in our operation. Technological advancements allowed us to achieve unparalleled precision, consistency, and efficiency while also driving innovation and pushing the boundaries of our jewelry crafting. Additionally, data and digitalization are becoming increasingly and inseparable importance to what we do here at Crafting and Supply. By capturing and analyzing the data of our operation, we gain very invaluable insights into our crafting process. This data-driven decision-making enhances our performance and ensures continuous improvement. To illustrate more the essence of combining craft and tech, and you will hear this word more when you walk through our Crafting and Supply facility, is that we look into our evergreen, iconic products. These products have been in our portfolio since 2019.
Anders has shown you a wonderful chart of the underlying progress of our gross margins and how we have been able to keep our average cost per unit consistently low. Hopefully, some examples that you will see on these slides will even bring that more to life. For example, on one of our silver bracelets with the heart-shaped clasp, we used 8.4 minutes to produce in 2019. By improving our crafting ability in wax processes and goldsmiths' operation, we can reduce that by approximately 17% of the total time. In addition, the other 12% improvement came from the two new machines that we have put into the operation. The same approach goes for all the products where we are enhancing our skills and implementing new technology yields positive impact to our productivity.
I really want you to think together with us about that scale that we produce, multiply that by the productivity improvement that we're doing. This moves a needle immensely. It speaks to the underlying gross margins of our business that Anders has been emphasizing. Once again, I want to emphasize that our journey doesn't stop there. Every year, we continue to drive productivity harder and harder and find ways to leverage our skill. Because our team, we truly believe that continuous improvement is a journey, not a destination. So always more and more to come. In summary, our Crafting and Supply will continue expanding our scale, robustness, and resilience to serve the demand with capacity expansion programs, for example, like in Vietnam, as our key initiatives. We will safeguard the future of Pandora by keeping innovation and developing our new products process to fuel our growth.
Craftsmanship is always the heart and soul of Pandora, where while we will enhance by technology, data-driven performances, digitalization to deliver market-leading, high-quality, and most affordable, beautifully crafted jewelry. Taking care of our people is our promise, and we will always keep that close to our hearts according to our value. We dream, we dare, we care, and of course, we deliver. We will always strive for excellence in our performance through a continuous improvement mindset to deliver Pandora's ambition in meeting consumer ever-changing demands. Conclusion, we keep investing in our skilled people, the necessary technology, innovation, data analytics, and digitalization. We can competitively offer beautifully jewelry with the highest standard of quality and cost and most accessible prices to give a voice to people's lives. With that, thank you very, very much for your kind attention.
Now I would like to invite Anders back on the stage, and we're looking forward to your questions. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Khun Ossie , and welcome back, Anders. Before we go into the Q&A session, I do have a bit of an announcement. If you are wondering where the Wi-Fi password is, it is actually on the table. In the little small card that you find there at the back, there is a Wi-Fi password for your convenience. Now, let's go into the Q&A session, and should you have any questions, feel free to raise your hand. Our team will be there to assist you. Yes, this gentleman over here, the microphone is coming to you.
Yes, a question for you, Anders. So when you talked about mitigation of the commodity price inflation, I would like to ask you, not for guidance on how much you can mitigate, but maybe you can explain a little bit about what's in the toolbox when you talk mitigation.
Thanks. Yeah, that's a super relevant question, Lars. In an odd way, I kind of like these external shocks. Maybe that's a bit too big word because it always gives me an excellent opportunity to shake the tree a little bit, creating an extra burning platform to look at things with a different lens. So starting from the top line, a couple of things that we have been looking at anyways for the last six months, and that includes the organic growth from network expansion. We have been guiding that we will be delivering a 3-point CAGR from network expansion between 2023 and 2026.
I know that you have a view on that. I see you're smiling. And that there might be an opportunity to grow a little bit faster than that, but that we are looking into regardless. But still the question mark whether we can do that. Another thing that we've been looking at for 6-9 months as well is our multi-brand network. So we think that we are under-penetrating on the multi-brand partners across a number of countries. It's not big revenue numbers, but it comes with incremental, let's call it 60% EBIT margin. And we have been working on that for a while. It's too early to conclude, but we may be able to talk a bit more about that on August 13. And then lastly, on the top line is about prices.
Obviously, when input cost goes up, we'll have to look at whether the 1-2 point of annual ASP increases, whether that's something we can do. Unfortunately, consumers don't really know about silver prices. It's different with gold. A lot of consumers know what happens with gold prices. Silver, that's not the case. But when silver is up like it is, we'll have to take another round looking at ASPs, and we're doing that as we speak. Then further down on the cost of goods sold side, the starting point is that we are super efficient already thanks to what is happening here in Thailand already. But there might be pieces that we can do, but from a little bit of a different lens. And that's about some product design.
You probably remember this, 10, 11, 12 years back when silver prices took a spike up. Then Pandora invented, so to speak, what we call the open work design. So Pandora used to have charms that were sort of solid, sort of solid pieces of silver. And back then, Pandora redesigned some of the products that become sort of more open work where you can look through the piece of jewelry. The beauty of that was that it saves silver, but the consumers thought that the value proposition was even more interesting because it looks more elevated. I don't know whether we have such a magic bullet in the pipeline, but it's something that Ossie together with Steven and MC are looking into over the summer, whether we have opportunities along those lines.
And then below the gross margin, gross profit line in the P&L, we're also looking at and taking another look at OpEx. So everything down through the P&L is in play. So just a couple of examples.
And then a question for you also, if I may. So you gave the four examples on how you have reduced crafting times on four specific SKUs. That reduction, was that sort of steady, and then you have a big aha, and then steady, then you have the next big aha? Or is this a more gradual evolution that you see continuing?
Yes, Lars, thank you very much. It's a great question. Let's say in our crafting and supply, what we have is always a continuous improvement, work that we continuously always do.
So there are, because as you can imagine, the efficiency, productivity that we can improve, it's of course on a steady basis, and we keep on improving. But there would be also some disruptive improvements that we need. Because just imagine the improvement that you can do will come up, and with, of course, the law of diminishing return, it will. So then you need that disruptive thinking and then change, then it goes up. So it goes together, I think, for my continuous improvement, plus also some disruptive thinking. And that's what our team is doing and also Joyce. And then you will also see a little bit later when you go through the plans, especially for the guests who have been here before a couple of years.
I would love to encourage you to see how much improvement, how much advancement, how much evolution that we have made, then that would be that. Thank you.
Would that be?
Thank you. Two questions for me to start with. So could you maybe comment a bit on the slide where you have the capacity expansions? There you show what is the cost level for the OEM/ODM capacity, just in terms of comparing that to the other facilities? And then I assume that that is higher, and then that you will not use that when you inaugurate the Vietnam facility.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, financially, I'll hand it over to you. That's okay.
Yeah.
That's the same but.
That's the reason that we only do 4.5%-5% of production with the OEMs. It's a nice flexibility buffer to have up and down to accommodate swings in demand.
But the price is meaningfully higher on the cost per unit. And I'm looking at you, Ossie, can we give an indication? Because normally I think that if you look at these, of course, they use the same amount of silver as we do. That's what it is on the rest. And I'm also looking at Christian in the middle down here, so being a VP of Finance here, it's around 30% higher price when we go with OEMs. I think we knew the number, but we were not sure if we can disclose it. Now I've done it. It's done. It's too late. And maybe just follow up on that, on the buffer part, will you use that after you also inaugurate Vietnam then? We'll still have that as a buffer capacity, the OEM, ODM? Yeah, we'll keep maintaining that.
We should always have a certain buffer capacity in that. We should never run at 100% capacity, also from a pure risk management perspective. So we will always have that.
And if I may add, I think it's a great question. Let's say usually we always keep our OEM and our ODM as partner. We have a certain percentage, as Anders said. The main reason is for capacity, of course, having that flexibility. But always, I mean, we want to be the best. We are the best, but we cannot be the best of everything. So we work with our partners who also bring in new ideas, innovations, and those kind of things as well. So that's why we also have a very healthy ecosystem of our partners here in Thailand and, of course, Vietnam. And we are starting already having also our ecosystem also in Vietnam as well. So we will continue to do that.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you.
Then just a nitty-gritty question on slide 12. Is that development on a like-for-like basis as I guess there's been quite a change in complexity of the products? So Moments products has in general been increasingly complex, but then some of the fuel for more products are less complex. So just wondering whether that is at slide 12, as far as I can see down there.
Slide 12. Thank you. Is that one?
Yeah. That's on a like-for-like basis, yeah.
That is on a like-for-like. Otherwise, for example, okay, diamonds is not a big thing yet, but that will completely skew the picture.
Okay. Perfect. Thank you.
Yes, hello. Two questions, please. First of all, you just said that it could be top-line initiatives to mitigate the commodities headwinds. Can you elaborate a bit more why a bit more space and also a bit more sales with these multi-brand parties would actually increase the margins? And also on the—I think there was this mention that Thailand offers positive things on the tax rate. So overall, in your overall tax rate, what's the impact in terms of tax rate from operating in Thailand?
Ye ah, maybe I can start out with on the top line. These are initiatives that we have been working on regardless. So when we made the announcement at the Capital Markets Day last year on a 3 percentage points CAGR from network expansion, we knew that the opportunity space is much bigger than that. But we didn't feel comfortable going beyond a 3 percentage points of CAGR.
But when you look at the capital market day presentation last year, we said that we had identified 7,000, we called it viable commercial locations where Pandora could have a store. And of that, we only announced that we would open up 400-500 new stores between 2023 and 2026. So a fraction of the global number of white spaces that we have. So let's see whether we actually think that we can grow beyond that. But on average, when we open up a new store, the EBIT margin is 35%-40%. So if we can accelerate network expansion, it is margin accretive on a group level. And the same, to the extent that we open up multi-brand partners and work with different types of partners, that's going to be margin accretive as well.
But we're not going to do it if it's not the right commercial decision, of course. But we have established back in, I think it was October last year, October, November last year, we established or re-established actually a small team in global office looking at our network from that lens. It's kind of gone unnoticed for the last many years. The focus has mainly been on the concept stores and our own retail network. And it's become a little bit at the expense of the multi-brand partner network, which serves a purpose in either very small cities or serves a purpose to build up knowledge of the brand. But let's see. We'll communicate a bit more on that in two months' time at the second quarter announcement.
On the tax rate, ever since the establishment of our first factory here in Thailand a long time back, we have been enjoying a much lower tax rate under the BOI, Board of Investment Scheme, in Thailand. Now, this year, 2025, those incentives are still in place. But with the new OECD minimum tax rules, most of that savings disappears this year because we will, ironically, the saving that we have in Thailand ends up being an additional corporate tax payment in Denmark. That's the OECD minimum tax rules. But historically, the benefit has reduced the effective corporate tax rate by 150 basis points to that tune up until last year. But that disappears this year, and then that's already baked into our effective tax rate guidance for 2024.
And maybe just a clarification. So I see on slide number 14 1.4, so you mentioned the 260 basis point headwind. In terms of the time, it will take time to get there thanks to hedging and passing through inventories, etc. So again, everything else being equal and without all the mitigating factors, so what's the timing to get to the 260?
Second quarter of 2025. So just a little bit less than a year out. So second quarter next year.
So if you had to quantify just the impact on full year 2024?
Okay. Zero.
Thank you so much for all of your questions. Do we have time for one more question for the gentleman in black?
I'll do it quickly. I'll just do one question then. Just when I look at the Pandora web page, there's still roughly 600, 700 different charms that you are selling. When you showed the impressive slide with how much you have improved time on different products, is there a chance that you have not looked at all of the charms that you have and all of the products that you have in terms of how much complexity they add to your production, in terms of time and cost that you spend on them, compared to the brand perception and how much it actually increases incremental sales?
Yeah. If I may, yes. I think it's really, really a good question because if you can say, but can we explain the improvements that we have? It's also working on two things. One is by product, by DVs. So those are the improvements that we do. But we also do by processes.
So to your point that you mentioned, there would be if we, for example, where we do, and you will see it when you go inside, where we improve the wax setting operations, for example. That would touch on all products. So that improvements will go into every product. But there are some, and you're absolutely right. There are some products which we say, "Oh, this one, we have a great opportunity. It's a best seller. We want to work on this," right, in order to also improve our gross margins. Then we will work on that. So we're doing that in both. Yes.
It's turned off. No, it's working again. And is there anything that you from management, executive management perspective can do in terms of mitigating actions from this SKU overview, taking some complexity out? Or is that not where Pandora is today?
We are looking into the, so from a design perspective, both in terms of existing jewelry, but also what's in the pipeline to be launched, whether there's something that can be designed in a different way given what's happened, so to speak. So that is in the cards. But as of today, there's no concrete things in the idea box. That's to be looked at over the summer.
And if I can add, Anders, to your question, I find it very, very interesting. And when you also walk inside it, you also see the history of our product. Actually, our product has become more and more, I would say, more consumer-centric from a one-piece charm going into different components. But if we didn't do all these improvements, just imagine the cost per unit, as Anders mentioned, would have gone up, but actually went the other way. That's a little bit what we're doing at the crafting and supply. Hopefully, you will see that when you walk inside.
Thank you so much for the questions. Thank you, Anders and Ossie. Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Thank you very much. Thank you.
Thank you. Well, it has been a very insightful morning, and I'm sure it will continue for the rest of the day. For now, I would like to invite you for a quick 10-minute break. Just at the back of this room, we will reconvene again at 11:45 A.M. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back from the break. Now, let's dive into our next agenda. We would have first, Joyce Lam, Vice President, Innovation and Product Development on the innovation, followed by Mads Twomey-Madsen, Senior Vice President, Global Communications and Sustainability on the sustainability agenda. Now, let's join me to welcome Joyce Lam on the stage, please. Thank you.
Good morning, everyone. I hope you have come back with a good break. I'm glad today to share with you how Pandora is leveraging innovation to support our growth. I'm Joyce Lam, Vice President of Innovation and Product Development. Innovation is a vital element to fuel any company's growth. In Pandora, innovation is our DNA. From Moments concept, which we launched 20+ years ago, to the latest patented machine we developed in-house, Pandora is continuously fueling and disrupting the jewelry industry as well as the jewelry product category. Pandora has an innovation vision to guide our effort to be a leader in innovation with two keywords. First, consumer. Consumer is at the heart of everything we do.
We have to understand the need and desire of our consumer to help them through our product, to tell their stories, to connect special meanings, and to help them to express themselves yet at an affordable price. Second keyword for us in innovation, it's scalability. With producing 100 million-plus pieces per year that mentioned by Ossie before, which no other jewelry company in the world is close to this number, it gives us a unique opportunity to leverage innovation. Craft and tech innovation is one of the keys to drive production efficiency. It is not just about installing more machinery, but about how to support our unique craftsmanship with new materials, new toolings, new jewelry capabilities, and new technology to deliver good quality products to consumers at a high cost and high price.
With that vision, we define the key purpose of our innovation: create value for consumers and optimize the cost of crafting. These outcomes are driven by three areas of innovation. First, product innovation. This relates to new materials, new features, and new categories of jewelry, which Pandora hasn't launched before, to deliver desirable and full jewelry assortments for consumers. Service innovation. These are services that improve our consumer experience, which interact with Pandora. Craft and tech innovation. These include technologies that relate to manufacturing to be able to produce better quality products at an accessible cost. As innovation management is the key to success, we have innovation boards to govern our innovation priorities and processes. Pandora has a lot of successful product launches. In this page, I would like to share with you the story behind it and how it connects to product innovation. First, Moments Concept.
Our first charm bracelet concept was launched in 2000 and still be our core collection for Pandora. It is not just a beautiful and unique design. It is a Pandora pattern mechanism, which helps us protect our iconic product. Rose Gold and Yellow Gold plated products are not new for the jewelry industry, but it was new for Pandora when we launched in 2016. It is not just to respond to the consumer's demand for more colorways of jewelry products, but set a good foundation for our success today in Timeless collection. Enamel was part of Pandora's finishing process for a long period of time to add color to our jewelry. Enamel with effect, though, was newly launched in 2022. This innovation allows the consumer to have new experiences with their jewelry, such as color changes due to temperature or light intensity.
This not just brought us good sales, but brought us a lot of attraction on Instagram and TikTok. If you are fans of Pandora, you must be very familiar with our iconic snake chain. In 2023, a new patent chain, Studded Chain, was introduced to provide more variety of our bracelets, and it was well received by consumers, this becoming our new iconic product. Jewelry might look small, especially our charm. Yet there is a great deal of design detail, and thanks to our craftsmanship, we are able to execute those detailed elements to consumers. We are not just mastering craftsmanship, as Ossie mentioned before. We are evolving in craftsmanship. In order to continuously create excitement and newness in products to consumers, we need to continuously evolve our crafting capability. This page highlights our crafting journey, and I would like to bring you to a deeper review of each.
Murano glass is a highly crafting process. It requires layer and layer of glasses under fire to form the required color and shape. Beyond Murano beads, we are evolving to achieve different shapes. It provides much better variety and was well accepted by consumers. For example, these days, we are making butterfly charms and turtle charms with Murano glass. Perfect stone setting becomes an important design element of our product. More and more stones are to be set on our jewelry, especially our Timeless collection. With different cuts of stone, this effect can be achieved by delicate design with high-skill craftsmanship. Shaded enamel. It is a very sophisticated effect, which you can also see on the left side, how the worker is executing on this product.
It requires highly skilled craftsmanship and their judgment on applying the right amount of color in the right area and blending to the required effect. This capability helps us to mimic the natural texture, stone pattern, like flower petal, cloud, or some natural stone pattern, while creating lots of newness elements to consumers, and every piece is unique. Interactive element. When you look in detail at Pandora products, there are lots of small movable parts, from spinning wheels of bicycle charms to sophisticated padlocks with functions. These interactive elements on jewelry add a lot of value to consumers. They are all assembled by hand. You can imagine the level of capability required of our craftsmanship.
While it supports the execution in good quality and cost, we have to leverage technology to support our craftsmen to provide high-quality metal parts to them, which brings us to the next pillar of innovation technology. It is not easy to optimize the jewelry process because it's highly crafted. Yet with the high production volume and the increasing expectation of quality from consumers, we need to apply technology where it makes sense. Alternative manufacturing, for us, means a manufacturing process beyond traditional jewelry processes. Plastic injection and stamping are two of the examples. They are widely used in the watches and electrical appliance industry. They help us to reach a high tolerance requirement. How high? Like 25 micron tolerance, meaning it's half of your hair thickness. This level of tolerance we are after.
While it's around that high volume and low cost we can achieve through this technology, it would be unreachable by traditional jewelry processes. This capability helps us to reach a wide range of product possibilities. Auto Snake Chain. As an iconic product of Pandora with high volume, we improve our efficiency by automatically producing our snake chain bracelet. The machine is internally developed by our engineering team and is patented. 2D and 3D wax setting. We apply manual stone setting in sophisticated designs, like you see on the previous page, while we also introduce automatic wax setting to improve the efficiency on simple designs with high volume. Vision soldering. As we move along our strategy to full jewelry brand setup, there are more assembly processes similar to fine jewelry. To achieve the level of refinement, we are using a vision detection system to support the soldering process. Wire forming.
With more chains and necklaces around the collection, we introduced a wire forming machine that allowed us to simplify manufacturing steps by forming high-quality wiring and soldering in one step. Now, I hope you have some idea of what Pandora is capable of innovating on product and craftsmanship and technology. One of the key elements to bring innovation to succeed is our innovation capabilities. Innovation library. It is not just capturing Pandora knowledge, but also industrial trends of new materials and technology relevant to us. Innovation lab. Enable us to provide MVP or prototype for new concepts in a very short time to validate innovative ideas with designers and marketing. Recently, we just expanded our muscle on machinery with new capabilities. This enables us to provide more intelligent machine solutions and machinery tooling fabrication possibilities and capabilities.
You will have a chance to see and experience some of that in the afternoon factory tour. Lastly, innovation is not a solo or isolated journey. We are creating an ecosystem of innovation by bringing together diverse players and fostering a culture of knowledge sharing. Ecosystems create the conditions necessary for innovation ideas to develop, scale, and succeed. In January this year, we had an event called Crafting and Supply Summit, where we delegated one day as an innovation day to allow our partners to share with us not just C&S, but also marketing and designers on their innovative ideas for the jewelry industry to identify the opportunities to collaborate and generate value together. If the partners have great ideas, Pandora is the right platform for them to work collaboratively with us and jump-start their innovations. Looking forward to showing you our innovation center in the afternoon tour.
With that, thank you very much. I would like to hand over to Mads for another important topic, sustainability. Thank you.
Hello, everybody. Good to see you. I'm Mads Twomey-Madsen, and I got the pleasure of heading communications and our sustainability arm at Pandora. And what I'm going to talk to you through now is sustainability. I'm going to show you how to Pandora. This is not just about complying with a growing amount of regulation, but very much also part of being a leader in our business. So, in short, when it comes to ESG, we believe we're a low-risk company with a lead position. In very few words, we are low carbon emitter. We have shifted our main raw materials to be recycled or come from renewable sources.
And because we're vertically integrated, we have a very, very high degree of control and transparency in what we're doing, and that's particularly important when it comes to sustainability. So, on the chart, you see a couple of acknowledgments that pretty much reflect the position we have in our industry. Let me just mention a couple of them. So, the carbon emissions target, we'll get to it later, is validated by the Science Based Targets initiative. It aligns with the Paris Agreement, and it aligns with what science says is necessary to keep global warming at 1.5 degrees. For the second year in a row, we're recognized by CDP with an A score for climate action and disclosure. We're also recognized by CDP as a supplier engagement leader. From MSCI, we're triple-A rated for the eighth year in a row, and we got a low-risk ranking from Sustainalytics.
Time magazine made a list of the world's best companies, and on that list, we're 21 on sustainability. Of course, we remain committed to the principles of the UN Global Compact as well. So, if we look back at the history of Pandora, giving back to local communities has been a core part of how we operate. It's been a lot about education because we know that education is a main lever to not just raise individual well-being, but also economic welfare. And so, you'll see that here in Thailand, for the past 18 years, we've had a My School project with that we've been refurbishing or constructing school buildings. Colleagues here nominate a school building every year, and we refurbish or construct the building, and that has helped some 8,000 children over the years. At a more global scale, we're one of the largest partners for UNICEF.
This also is very much centered around education and empowerment through learning. So, to date, we donated $11 million since we started this program a few years back, and that has resulted in aid coming to more than 1 million children in the form of educational programs and emergency relief. Fast forward to today, and you'll see that sustainability is a cornerstone in how we operate the company. It's also one of the foundational elements in the Phoenix Strategy. So, you see up here three pillars. Those are our main strategic pillars when it comes to driving sustainability. And we've set targets across these: low carbon, circular, inclusive, diverse, and fair. And I'm just going to talk you briefly through the main parts of that. So, on the left-hand side, low carbon.
We have one of the most ambitious climate targets, not just in our industry, but pretty much ranking up against global peers. We set out to halve our emissions across all scopes, so Scope 1, 2, and 3 by 2030, and we're well on our way to getting there. I'll show you more about that in a second. On circularity, you might have picked up that we reached our target of shifting our main raw materials, silver and gold, to 100% recycled. We're going to do that next year, but we actually completed it December 2023. And with that, we're quite sure that we are in the lead when it comes to circularity in the core of our business. On inclusion and diversity, we've set a target a few years back to get to gender parity in our senior leadership.
And since then, every year, we've climbed several percentage points and are standing at about 34% now, again on track to get to gender parity at the latest in 2030. As you probably know, we've integrated these targets in our incentive programs and also in all company financing. So, just a few weeks ago, in line with that, we launched a new EUR 500 million bond, and you see that that is linked to carbon emissions and gender diversity. So, with these public targets, we commit our brand, and with our link in incentive programs, we commit deeply into how we incentivize our senior leaders. And then we add this extra layer of corporate financing, sustainability linked to show that we're really serious about this agenda.
So, I'm going to give you a bit of a closer look at the carbon emissions part of our sustainability program and how we plan to lower them. For Scope 1 and 2, so what we do inside our own four walls, this makes up just 3% of our total carbon emissions, and that's very much due to the efforts we've been making in shifting to renewable energy. As Ossie said, here in Thailand, our operations run 100% on renewable energy. So, the remaining emissions are pretty much about refrigerants and some on-site fuel use. The big chunk of our work then sits in Scope 3. You got the pie over on the right-hand side. That's 97% of our total emissions, and you see it break down on categories.
Typically, for a company like ours, crafting materials would be a larger relative part, but thanks to the shift we've done on recycled silver, recycled gold, this is a relatively small part of our Scope 3 emissions now. So, we believe we're quite on our way in demonstrating how it's possible to separate growth and emissions. If we take our baseline year 2019, so this is the baseline year we set for carbon emissions. Since then, we cut emissions across all Scopes by 27%. In that same period, you will know that we've grown the company revenue by about 29%. So, it's a very nice development. We're on track to get to our target for 2030. It's not a done deal, and it's not going to be a linear journey either.
So, with the expansions we're making on production in Vietnam, with the network expansion, and with refurbishing of stores, we have some bumps on the way. We'll see probably an increase, a slight increase this year and next, but we're comfortable that we're going to drive down towards our 2030 target. I'll just put a couple of words on how we're going to get to that. You see the move on the right-hand side. So, in our own facilities, we continue to drive for energy efficiencies. So, just last year, we put in new lighting, new air compressor solutions here in Thailand. They helped us quite a lot. In our stores, we've already rolled out a good bit of renewable energy. We continue that and expect to complete a full shift to renewable energy this year for all stores.
Here in Thailand, we already run on renewable energy, but what we're doing is solidifying that with even more kind of direct and owned production. So, we just established up in Lamphun, where we're going tomorrow, a direct line based on biomass energy. So, for Thailand, we're now running on 27% owned renewable energy on-site. In Scope 3, so the big piece, we're doing quite a lot. So, we're looking at shifting our transportation to biofuels. We're looking at shifting from air to road. We're cutting travel emissions. We're asking our franchisees to also shift to renewable energy in their stores. We work with suppliers across the board to have them shift to more renewable materials and to purchase renewable energy.
And then, as a key component in this, as we mature the data and get more and more specific data from our suppliers, we expect that some of our estimates turn out to be conservative now, and so that's also going to drive down emissions. So, that's our plan for now on carbon. We can take more questions on that later. A few words just on another key aspect of sustainability. So, waste, this is something that the company has worked with for many years, and we're in a quite good place. So, we recycle 99.8% of our waste from crafting. It's used as an input to other industries. So, if you take gypsum, it goes to composting and brick production. You take Murano, it goes into glass bottle production, and rubber is used as a fuel blend for cement production.
The past 2 years, we haven't sent 1 kilogram of waste to landfills, and we aim to keep it that way. To wrap up this piece, I was going to talk a little bit more about the scale of the transformation we think we're representing, the changes we made with materials on silver and gold, and then the newer one on lab-created diamonds. Making this shift to recycle silver and gold is not something done overnight. We spent the past about 4 years doing this, and 100 colleagues have been involved, a lot of them here in Thailand. In particular, it has required that we work very, very closely with more than 40 suppliers. What has to happen in making this transformation is that we've decided to run our recycle program according to the strictest standard available in the industry.
It's the Responsible Jewellery Council's chain of custody. And so, suppliers would have to adapt their supply and their production lines to be able to segregate non-certified or non-recycled silver and gold from the deliveries they're making to us. And that has taken a lot of time. It's now in place, and we have a very mature supply chain in this regard also. So, what's the climate impact on silver? You see it up here. It's quite noticeable. So, recycled silver has a third of the carbon footprint compared to freshly mined. For gold, it's even more. It's 1%. So, we're making serious carbon reductions when we shift to recycled. We estimate that we avoid around 58,000 tons of CO2 by running on recycled silver and gold. And if you put that in perspective, our total emissions are 264,000 tons of CO2.
So, it's a very, very big difference we're making by just this one shift on materials. Lab-created diamonds are transformative in terms of how we address consumers. They're also very transformative when it comes to environmental impact. So, the reason for that is that the diamonds we use in our jewelry are made with 100% renewable energy. And that makes the whole difference in carbon accounting. You reduce the footprint by 95% compared to a similar mined diamond. So, it's a very, very different product that you provide. So, here probably is one of the only cases in consumer products. You have something that is both cheaper for the consumer wallet, and it's also a whole lot cheaper for the planet.
So, what we did was we asked Ramboll, the engineering group, to give us a couple of numbers, and that's the last slide, to put some of this into tangible perspective when it comes to what the consumer gets and what the world impact is. If we start with my favorite charm, it's a family tree charm, the one I have here, made in sterling silver. We're now able to manufacture this with a carbon footprint of about 0.2 kilograms of CO2. Now, that would be the same as a café latte that you might have gotten earlier this morning. And if you're up to two, well, that's two silver charms already. The Lab-grown Diamond Ring on the left-hand side, it's one of our flagship products. So, it's a one-carat ring set in recycled gold.
That one would have a carbon footprint of just above 11 kilograms, and that is the same pretty much as a pair of average jeans that you're wearing in here. It hopefully lasts a whole lot longer. So, we asked Ramboll to calculate what if the whole diamond industry was run on diamonds that had this type of footprint and to give us kind of a sense of the difference we're looking at. It's the same as replacing about 2.4 million cars in New York City with electric vehicles. So, it's a real meaningful difference that these innovations are making. And we think it points to the future of luxury. We think we're in the lead for that future. So, with that, I'll open up to questions. I'll invite Joyce up here on the stage with me, and we'll talk about sustainability and innovation.
Thank you, Mads and Joyce. We are now open to questions from the floor. Again, please raise your hands if you have any questions. Yes, please, honored gentlemen over here.
First an offer, then a question. So, gender parity, I assume that also means in the models you use. So, if you have too few male models, I would volunteer for that. Then a question to you, Joyce. So, I mean, given your background from Swarovski, before you joined Pandora, how unique is the sort of end-to-end integration you have here? And maybe from a different angle, is that a hindrance for Pandora acquiring another brand and then integrating it into production? So, if you acquired Kendra Scott or Brilliant Earth or something, would it be completely impossible to fit that into this way of thinking production?
Lars, very good question. The first question, let me think a bit first. How can I answer that?
The second question first, if we, or how can we insert a brand into Pandora? I think we lately have a very good example, which is Essence, the collection we just acquired from the market and we just launched as well. So, this is the product segment, which is a bit like what I'm wearing now. So, they are not traditional Pandora jewelry, and it fits very well because that becomes fitting the white space that Pandora jewelry is not yet tapped into. So, that's in terms of going to full jewelry brand assortment. In fact, it's opened a lot of rooms for us to acquire different types of product categories. So, Essence, like Anders mentioned before, its launch might be a few weeks' time. So, a bit observing the performance in terms of sales, but then the pilot was very positive.
So, that's also definitely see a good, good progress on that. Now, to your first question, compare to Swarovski to Pandora, because Swarovski have a lot of information they haven't disclosed. I also could not disclose as well. But just in terms of how much Pandora is integrated or well integrated, because we are a vertically integrated company. So, from the design to retail, I think one very, very unique proposition of Pandora is how we leverage the innovation since very beginning on the value chain compared to other brands. And then since that time, we are a highly integrated consumer in the conversation, which is also different because sometimes when brand or when company, they do innovation, it's for the sake of new technology. But in here, it's a totally different approach. It's very pragmatic. It's very consumer-oriented.
And it's also linked to, at the end, how it's go to market as well. So, I think just on that part of end-to-end integration of design or innovation to the market, Pandora is very well advanced compared to other brands. I hope answering your question, Lars.
To the lady over here on the middle table.
Hi. I have a question for Joyce. How much of our innovation is proposed by us, and how much is proposed by our suppliers, and how do we work with them to bring that to life, and who shares the IP in order to prevent that from competitors getting that? Just curious about that process.
Yeah. I wish I could answer that, but in fact, the innovation is very diverse. We have machinery innovation, material innovation, product innovation. The figure you asked, we even haven't done proper statistics on the number or ratio.
I could not give you the percentage. But there is really a different model. Some are completely come from in-house. Some are completely come from the partner. If they have the patent, we have to have a contract with them on how to handle that. And sometimes it's also co-create. It really depends on the scenario. We have different models. But one thing is very good because Pandora is very familiar with the patent process. When we saw there is an opportunity which can protect our own brand on new innovation, then we will have no hesitation to go after that.
Yes, the gentleman over there.
Thank you. A question on how much more expensive is recyclable silver, and maybe could you comment a bit on what is studies on consumer preferences and awareness of buying jewelry which is recyclable versus non-recyclable?
Yeah, very good. So, I think our take is that we pay a premium to go recycled. And with using recycled instead of not at all using recycled, you're looking at a cost of about $10 million on an annual basis. So, that's cost that we're absorbing because we believe this is the way to go for our business. You will not see it in our stores coming to them at the moment, but what we know is that when we test various types of concepts for consumer preference, circularity beats carbon many times over. So, this is the part of sustainability that many consumers can relate to and kind of accept immediately, right? So, we do believe we're building for a position in this space.
Thank you. Then just a second question. Maybe if you could comment a bit on De Beers not abolishing the Lightbox initiative they have. What kind of impact do you see from that?
So, we wouldn't comment on De Beers. What we can say is we feel very comfortable with our supply situation.
Okay. Thank you.
All right. Would there be any more questions? Yes, for the gentlemen in the first row, middle table. Thank you.
Question for the innovation part. Can you maybe talk about the balance that we're seeking between automation, which is more for mass production versus more kind of flexible production model given the different SKUs and more lines that we're opening up?
It's a very, very good question. In terms of that, when you go to the factory touring this afternoon, you will witness yourself. Majority of our process is crafting. Craftsmen is highly, highly skilled, trained craft people. While we use the machinery, we would say it's supporting their operation.
How it's supporting means, for example, the interactive element you saw before. We support them to make a better tolerance metal part by machine. And then the craftsmen assembly by hand. So, this is how we are leveraging technology where it makes sense. It could be in terms of processes. It could be in terms of the high-volume item. So, that's a big connect to also the answer on the last section as well. It's really twofold. Processes, which is labor-intensive, then we would think how we can leverage technology to support them. On the other side, high-volume item, we would detect possibility and opportunity to optimize the cost. So, it's how we usually use the technology and craftsmen.
And just a quick follow-up. The Essence, for example, is it completely new lines in our production facility, or how much is it shared with other lines?
Essence is new for our production, but it's within our existing capacity. So, that is how we are able to transform ourselves to produce different types of jewelry. That's why we have to evolve continuously of our craftsmanship.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you very much. That would be the end of the Q&A session with Joyce and Mads. Thank you so much for the session. Thank you.
Thank you.
All right. Welcome. Welcome back. I would imagine that there's a few of you that were actually looking forward to sit down again. At least I was. But even though we know there was a bit of some parts of what you've seen today was a repeat of what you saw yesterday, then there's always a power in repeating messages, and especially when you see it in the right sequence today.
So, from the beginning to the end, I think it becomes much more logical. What does handcrafting jewelry at scale, what does that really mean? I think it stands out clearer. It's 18 months ago since I was here last time, and I'm pretty amazed at what has happened just in the course of 18 months. I can see that the CapEx that has been approved by someone has come into play, including in a few robots. So, good to see. I just want to do a very brief recap before we go into, I think we have 42 minutes of the Q&A, if I remember right. Something like that, if we're still on time. You saw this slide yesterday with what we call the Pandora ecosystem. And it's something that we are quite proud about. Obviously, it's something that's been built over the last 25 years plus.
And it all starts with, again, just repeating with the brand. The fact that we have the most well-known jewelry brand in the world, and the fact that that brand is mostly known as the brand where you can build your own piece of jewelry, the brand that owns the space of meaningful jewelry, that's really the core of why we see the traffic that we do into our stores around the world. And then that traffic leading into an average store of four-wall EBIT margin above 40%, and a gross margin at 25% EBIT margin. That's kind of the core of what is our competitive edge and what is difficult to replicate for someone else. And then around the brand, we are building distribution at scale and crafting at scale. And the last piece, that's what we're spending the last couple of days on.
But this is full sort of end-to-end integration from design, manufacturing, own distribution centers actually as well. We run most of the distribution in-house as well, and then direct-to-consumer distribution. That is what's driving efficiency and consistency and the high margins that we have in the business. And it's also that unity between the brand, crafting, and distribution that allows us to run a company which we think that will be more and more clear that this is a growth compounder that we can keep driving nice, steady revenue growth over the years. And over the last couple of days, we obviously dived into the last piece here, crafting at scale. And we made a slide that summarizes the key takeaways. Have we put this into the printer? I can't remember. We did. Yeah. So that's in the back.
Or just worrying if you can't see this from behind, but you have it in front of you. First of all, one of the key takeaways that we want you to take away from the last two days is that we have, with the crafting at scale, we can produce at low cost. And I'm even tempted to call it very low cost. I don't think you'd find many jewelry companies around the world with almost 80% gross margin. I actually haven't looked at a lot of companies around, even though there's not that many listed companies. I actually don't think I've found any being at 80% gross margin. So I would say thank you, Ossie. Thank you, Lars. And thank you for the crafting team here. And thank you, Christian. 80% gross margin that comes very much from a very low cost per unit.
But secondly, I think this is super important. And this whole has become very visible during the last couple of days. The fact that it's cheap production, it doesn't come with low quality. Normally, you would say, "Okay, then it's cheap stuff, but it's low quality." But this actually, it's the other way around. We actually produce jewelry at a quality that's comparable to something that's much, much higher in that. I think even Lars, you leaned out a little bit earlier today saying, "Well, maybe without the quality of our products, it's above what you would find with something which is much, much more high-end." I don't want to be quoted for that, but it's definitely low cost doesn't mean low quality. That's what we want you to take away.
Then, with the scale that we have, that enables us to drive basic craftspeople, processes, and leverage technology to a degree you wouldn't be able to do if you were our main competitor, our main competitor being the local, unbranded, privately held, one or two-person company that's still 70% of the jewelry market. That's that kind of company. And of course, there's no way they probably didn't think about leveraging processes and technology in the way that we do. Then, we also want you to take away that with in-house manufacturing at this scale, we can supplement on the pure creative part of innovation done by Stephen Fairchild and the team across Milan and Copenhagen, but also to drive innovation within different types of material production methods and product functionality. I think you've seen ample examples of that within the last couple of days.
Some people who are new to the Pandora story would be intuitively being concerned about that. When you have in-house crafting, but also in-house distribution, you have a lot of fixed costs. I think we tried to make clear yesterday on the cost of goods sold side. That's definitely not the case, with only 4%-5% of our cost of goods sold being truly fixed. So that's not a leverage risk in the P&L because you have the in-house crafting, not at all. And then finally, I think we're running a company with a low-risk sustainability profile. By nature, jewelry is a low-carbon emission business. But then when you add that with that we have in-house crafting, we have a pretty good control on this part of the value chain from a sustainability perspective, not just carbon emission, but also from a people perspective.
I hope also that has come across in a good way during the last couple of days. This is why Mads, yesterday, in one of the first slides, he said that Pandora is a low-risk sustainability profile. I have to say, knock on wood, because always when you say that, then something would happen. But we dare say that the company is a pretty low-risk sustainability profile company. So with that, we have a very 15. Can we stretch that a little bit, or would that be dangerous? But it's yeah. Let's see how. Yeah. I know a lot of questions have been asked during the day, but otherwise, let's take a question.
Yeah. The earlier slide, when you picked up for the first slide, the first two bands, the first one and number two.
Okay. Quick questions and quick answers then. That's what we will be doing. And feel free to ask questions to anyone.
Don't ask us.
I'll let you have that discussion in five minutes. I love talking, so that's all. So thank you for everything. The last two days have been very helpful. But as you guys transitioned towards becoming a full jewelry brand, which I think is one of the main objectives of the Phoenix Strategy, it was apparent to us that the unit cost of production is obviously a bit higher because the complexity is more, or at least the time it takes to make certain units. Does that mean that you will have some pressures in your efficiency ratios as the product needs to evolve?
I guess there was a question for the one with the long answer and the one with the short answer.
Maybe I'll jump in. Let's say, of course, like we also mentioned earlier to our customers around that for full jewelry brand, the products will be different in terms of time. But of course, we take the same approach in terms of, of course, optimization. And when we design those products, we also go for the cross-market targets as well. So we do not, and we do not see that we will impact that. That's a short question.
Very good.
Yeah. I just want to also add, just from a commercial lens, our merchandising team, our GBU, the innovation team, are very, very involved in when we have new product innovations to have margin targets that are equal or creative. So even though they'll be having higher cost per unit, we then price accordingly. So there's a very tight governance structure around it to protect the margins.
Thank you.
Is that fine? Yeah. Yeah. One reflection that I've had over the past couple of days is that the share price is working this way. I mean, I know that's what I focused on, but the silver price is fluctuating over time. Now you're seeing the headwind in the silver price. And now it seems a little bit to me like you are going to allocate a lot of resources, management time on how do we solve this? Where can we look for scrutinized business?
I guess that you would also have the other perspective is that silver price is silver price, and we shouldn't be focused on because there are so many things that we see around these factories that you can do and just continue what you're doing and not focusing on sort of all the small things that you can do on the roadworks and extra investments here and there. Does it make sense for you to focus so much on these mitigating actions rather than focusing on just keep doing what you're doing, basically? That would be sort of my reflections.
That's a fair question, Martin. I think if we had been in a situation where we would need to initiate, I'm just saying something, 50 new things in order to even dream about mitigating the headwind from commodities, then it might have been a different answer. But as I mentioned yesterday, some of the if you look at the drivers I mentioned yesterday on ASPs, that's a machine that's running anyways.
So where we can go out and say, "Okay, we just have to let's test that now with what's happening in the world, gold and silver prices going up, are there pockets where we can increase prices more than what already planned?" It doesn't drive a lot of additional work. Then the other two top-line drivers I mentioned was about network expansion and forward integration, also called multi-brand expansion. That was running already. So now we just talk about it because in the light of what is happening, so that's not new. So what is new is the one where we look at, is there something we can do on the product design side that's triggered by the circumstances? So that's probably the main additional thing that comes on the table.
And there we are taking a, I'll call it initially, a fast approach where getting a view on forming the view between marketing, design, and crafting and supply. Is there something that we should look further at? And then we'll see whether does that lead to that one small pocket that we're talking too small, or is there some one or two big ideas that we can pursue? And that's part of the reason why we can't give you an answer yet on to what extent we can mitigate the higher commodity prices. But the agenda is full already. So it is that, yeah, a trade-off. But I think it would be irresponsible not to dedicate some time and resources to it when you have a structural shift in the silver prices like this.
Yeah. So one of the other mitigating drivers you're looking into is potential price increases. Maybe could you talk a bit about what are the processes there? How do you do it? How do you structure it? How does it work? Just maybe the flow inside of Pandora. How do you, yeah, evaluate whether you should do a price increase or not?
Yeah. We have a small team sitting in Massimo's organization, our Chief Commercial Officer, that looks at that. They build, typically the way they work is they build a number of hypotheses across what type of products or what kind of type of price points might there be a pocket for us where we could price off based on different consumer insights and looking at other types of gifting and looking at other types of jewelry.
And then we test that hypothesis online where, and I'm not sure I'm explaining it in a super good way, but you can take a certain zip code in the U.S. as an example. Evergreen, Florida, as an example. When you go and look for this type of jewelry, you see a higher price than you would in the rest of the U.S. You can track what happens to the elasticity when you do that. For legal reasons, when you get that consumer in Florida, it gets all the way through to check up the prices being getting back to the original level because you're not in order not to have different prices. But that's how we're testing whether the hypothesis works and what's the elasticity.
If it works out, then it gets to the ELT, the executive leadership team, and we make a decision on whether we move ahead or not. That's kind of in a simple way of the process.
Got it. And the initial thought is potential, how much price increases? You've usually done this 1%-2% a year. That's something you've been doing. The journey you've begun is not that far away. But is that in the same range, or is it potentially more, or what?
That's the work to be done between now and August 13. On the Q2 announcements, to see with the news of Lynx on it, do we see opportunities to do more than this 1%-2% per year. So that would be too early to think about. One way I said yesterday that, in general, consumers don't know about commodity prices, but they know more about gold prices than silver prices. Okay, then it could be that on the plated part of our collection, whether we can, is there a potential to pass on the higher gold prices to a bigger extent than what we can do on the silver price? That could be one hypothesis to test out.
Thanks.
Two quick questions. So one a little bit of an update on lab-grown diamonds. So we saw two units there potentially for lab-grown into the future. So just your view on that recently with the different news that's gone into the marketplace, some of the fears and others, and whether you're going to expand your SKUs on the lab-grown as well because they're very specific design. The second one, well, I'd let you go for that one first if that's okay.
Yeah. Maybe obviously, you can go on and ask and chip in yours. But from a supply perspective, we've gotten quite a number of perspectives whether there's any issues from a supply perspective with what has been communicated from one of the players in the industry recently. Starting off saying, we've never confirmed who is actually our supplier. So it becomes a little bit of a hypothetical answer. And then I know that someone's sitting smiling here, but that's no impact on our supply situation from what is going on. We have a number of different suppliers anyways that we can sort of play out against each other. Absolutely.
In terms of the thought process from a couple of years ago, do you feel like the lab-grown is on track with what you expected?
It's been a slower start than what we expected. So we started out in testing in U.K. in May 2021. May 2021 was, I think, that's where we did. And then we tested for a year in the U.K. And the learning curve on how to sell this in the stores has been longer than what we had anticipated. On the other hand, I think the halo effect on the brand has been, in a positive sense, has been stronger than what we thought. So the uplift that we see on the brand metrics for people who know that we sell lab-grown diamonds has been more positive than what we had believed when we started out on this journey some time back.
I think what we have seen so far is definitely a clear proof that the brand can be stretched into a higher price point. Even though, on average, I think the ASP on lab-grown diamonds is more than 10 times up, more than 10 times up compared to a standard Pandora product. So it's obviously in a very different league. But the fact that that still means that a lab-grown diamond is 70% below a mined diamond from a retail price still plays very well into the affordability proposition of the brand.
And then can I just jump on affordability, thinking about your plating products? I was really positively surprised by the quality and your certification and the way that you're following the depth that you have in terms of percentage of precious metal that's involved. But I don't see that in the stores.
Talking to some of your staff, it's like, "Yeah, well, we're getting that through on social media, but not all of your purchases are on social media because a lot of them will go in and buy for younger generation as gifting." So it would be great to see that actually in store on walls, for example. I just wondered, what is the plan on the marketing side for messaging around really the elevation and the education on what you're doing aside from the elevated price and the gifting side and the personalization side? It seems like a lot more that you could quickly do. So I just wondered from a marketing perspective, what's the plan?
Yeah. But it's actually been a debate for a long time. We think that we are under-communicating what happens in Chiang Mai and in Bangkok.
So the crafting element and the quality element, we can and should push in a stronger way. We haven't concluded on exactly how you do that and how we build that, whether you build that into your media messaging or whether that's more something that is going to be part of the sales ceremony when you are in the store. So the message being passed on by the sales associates in the store, telling the story about the piece of jewelry you're standing with in your hand is actually handcrafted. And on average, I think it's been through 25 pairs of hands, something like that, an average Pandora product. I've picked up a couple of questions around during the last couple of days on that.
It's something that is underplayed and is probably a bit of a shame because going to see when we do consumer research, we can see that there's a tendency to believe that it's an affordable product, i.e., quality can't be that high. We need to be better at passing on that message because that, in a way, leverages the investment that we have within our crafting facilities in a better way, so. Absolutely. If you're only putting the idea and the messaging in store, you've got to get that person in store in the first place. Who thinks they're going in for affordable jewelry at a decent proposition, but not affordable jewelry at the very high end, so. Yeah. Still to come on how we pass on that message in a stronger way. Start with last.
Yeah. Thanks for two amazing days. I learned a lot. First of all, ping pong can actually play ping pong. We're not out today. But to me, the big eye-opener are all these efficiency gains that we've now put into numbers for the first time. So my question is really too, so on that efficiency gain curve, both in Bangkok and here, where are you? Are you just at the beginning, or are you in the middle, and it's becoming flatter, or are you at the very end? And to the extent you still see a lot of room for efficiency gains, how do you think business model-wise is it still going to be, what should we call it, a pedestrian EBIT margin expansion because you reinvest more in driving topline? Or how do you think about business model beyond 2026?
Maybe we start out with the efficiency.
Yeah. Please, yeah.
And Lars, thank you very much for the question. I mean, if we look, I think it's also related to the question you asked us yesterday. And I think, of course, from our productivity, we are always continuously improving, and that's where we will always continue. I think if you look at where we I think we have still very much potential. We're always forward-looking. And then, of course, with the technology, with the enhancement of the data digital, we still feel we're still at the early stage, but we do feel that we can continue and improve that further. And of course, as we always set targets together with Anders, we always set an improvement year on year. So that will continue.
Yeah. And then on the longer piece, what happens beyond 2026? As a starting point, that we have said that between now and 2026, we see between one and 200 basis points of EBIT margin expansion. Now, just looking at the commodity price discussion for a while. But then when we look then ahead even longer than 2026, I think the way that we obviously haven't communicated anything yet on whereas the company in 10 years. But we think that beyond 2026, if you ask me today, then the thinking is pretty much like, how will we manage it now that, yes, we are reinvesting some of the leverage or all of the leverage back into driving the business? But then at the end of the day, that reinvestment needs to drive a higher absolute EBIT on the bottom line.
So if we had been sitting investing like what we're doing today and had had our 5% organic growth, okay, then that reinvestment doesn't really pay off. But with the type of topline growth that we've been seeing, the absolute EBIT becomes higher. So that's kind of the dynamic that we will keep looking at. But with a 7%-9% organic growth, like what we have said at the CMD, then there would be some leverage coming down through to the bottom line. But if we then say, okay, we could keep staying at 27% EBIT margin after 2026 for an 8-12% organic growth per year, okay, then that might be a good trade-off. But that's kind of the trade-off we need to.
Of course, then the follow-up is if you need to invest in more technology, more hardware to achieve those efficiency gains, and we don't expand your EBIT margin, won't your return on invested capital come down? Yeah. But I think the kind of investment level you're looking at with the machines that we've been looking at here, it's not going to move the needle to any big extent. So of course, when I have the discussion with Christian and Lars and Ossie, I would say that it's way too expensive. But if you look at it in terms of the return on invested capital, it's not going to move to any big extent.
Right. My question is a follow-up question. I guess when you're balancing the automation, so I see automation is driving a lot of efficiencies, driving the margins, and so on, versus what you mentioned, Adam, in terms of the storytelling around handcrafting and how that's helping elevating the brand. If you want to become a full jewelry brand, when you look at your research, how important actually is it to the consumer that something is handcrafted, or do they not care? How are you balancing that two messages?
Yeah. Christian and I had exactly that discussion. Was it yesterday? I think it was earlier today.
I said Lars, Ossie, and Christian come to Copenhagen and say, "Just hypothetically, we could do without 12,000 people in China, we could automate everything with 0 headcount in China, just doing everything with a machine." Even though it was a good business case, we would probably say no because then that's just putting things on the extreme because there's a value in being able to say that it's handcrafted, and there's a limit on how far you can go, and then still say, "This is a handcrafted piece of jewelry." So I hope that gives you some idea on that. And we need to be able to hang on to say, "This is handcrafted jewelry." That's kind of as far as we can go. That means we can still go further than what we do today, but there's a limit on how far we can go.
Do you have any idea, to your point on consumer education, what percentage of your customers at the moment actually know what the manufacturing process is?
You're down to the more hardcore fans. It's quite limited still. I think that's clearly an opportunity for us to build that in the minds of consumers. A very important decision criteria for consumers is quality. We can score higher on that one.
Last question. Last question is this one. Did you suggest that after 2026, the reinvestment rate in the business will step down?
I think it depends on what kind of return that we see on the additional investments that we are doing.
I think fundamentally, the algorithm that we see now doesn't change because once we communicate about what the strategy looks after 2026, there's probably going to be a lot of similarities to how we drive the business today. Given that, as I said yesterday, the starting point is 1.4% market share in the total jewelry market. So we're not playing in the total jewelry market, but it's still small scale. So yeah.
Sorry? May I ask a question?
Yeah. I know that some of you have a flight to catch, but we still have a couple of important sort of things. We haven't announced yet the winner of the competition. I'll save that for just 1 more minute. But we are at the end of it, at the end of the 2 days here at the crafting facilities.
I hope you feel educated, wiser on who Pandora actually is. I made a bet with the team before getting here that I hope that at least from at least two-thirds of you who came here and haven't been here before, that we would get a, "Wow." So is this really Pandora? I think I picked up a little bit along those lines during the last couple of days that it is different to see this with your own eyes rather than just reading it on a piece of paper. I usually work with the left side of my brain, so the Excel part of the brain, probably not a big too big of surprise to you. But there's a couple of places, two places in Pandora where I feel that the right side of the brain, the stomach feeling gets into play.
One of the places is obviously here at the crafting facilities. I keep saying that to Ossie and the team that I just love to come here. Once you feel a little bit down, you can either go to the medical center, as you hear, or you can just go visit the crafting facilities here, and then you get reenergized. I kind of get the same feeling when I visit a Pandora store. If you enter into a discussion with a good sales colleague, a good store manager about how do you use jewelry to tell something about yourself, you get kind of the same feeling at a much smaller scale. Obviously, you get it at a much bigger scale here in Thailand with 12,000 colleagues at the crafting facilities.