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PANDORA ANNUAL REPORT 2016
28 • BUSINESS STRATEGY
THE WORLD’S LARGEST
JEWELLERY MARKET
China
China is the world’s largest jewellery market,
with an estimated value of around DKK 700
billion. This makes it an important emerging
market for PANDORA.
Brand awareness is of high importance for
us in China and in 2016 we concentrated on
growing our presence and brand awareness
across the country. We are opening around 40
new concept stores in China every year and
will continue to do so for the next couple of
years. In 2016, we opened a total of 44 new
concept stores, entering five new cities. In
addition, we opened an eSTORE, and entered
into an agreement with Alibaba Group to sell
our products on its
Tmall.comwebsite.
These efforts are clearly working. In
2016, aided brand awareness among women
increased to 53% in Beijing and Shanghai,
compared with 35% in 2015, and our
revenue grew by 175%. All this has given
us a strong foundation in China. But China
still holds great potential for PANDORA, and
we will continue to expand over the coming
years at a controlled but ambitious pace.
STRENGTHENING
OUR BRAND
The US
The US remains our largest market in terms
of revenue, and PANDORA has extremely
high brand awareness among US consumers.
In order to further strengthen our sales and
brand image, we focused on expanding our
branded store network in the US in 2016.
As part of this work, we opened net 264
branded stores, including net 27 concept
stores. We closed net 829 multibranded stores
including an upgrade of our presence in more
than 200 stores run by the US jewellery chain
Jared to shop-in-shops.
This strengthening of the PANDORA
brand is certainly working. Data from
ShopperTrak Market Intelligence shows
footfall traffic to US malls was 6.9% lower in
2016 compared with 2015. Despite this slow
traffic to US malls, we delivered 5% growth in
2016, with both our physical stores and our
eSTORE, which opened in 2015, performing
well.