In the fourth quarter of 2024, Pandora’s comparable sales in China plummeted by 10%, with revenue reaching just 104 million Danish kroner (DKK) and a market share of less than 1%. Faced with this severe downturn, the jewelry giant announced plans to close at least 50 stores in China. At the time, Pandora operated 198 stores nationwide, meaning the closures would shrink its Chinese store network by over 25%.
Analysts attribute the underperformance to a misalignment between Pandora’s "accessible luxury" positioning and Chinese consumers’ expectations. Compared to premium European brands, Pandora’s penetration gap remains stark, highlighting the broader challenges faced by accessible luxury brands in expanding within the Chinese market. How Pandora will navigate this crisis and regain traction in China remains a key question for the future.
Accessible Luxury/Mid-Tier Brands Face Challenges
Brands like Pandora in the accessible luxury segment have indeed hit bottlenecks. The core contradiction lies in their ambiguous positioning: they neither compete with the status-symbol attributes of top-tier luxury brands nor match the cost-performance advantages of Chinese domestic designs.In terms of channels, excessive reliance on physical stores (Pandora’s sales per square meter in China are only one-fifth of Tiffany’s) and a lagging shift to e-commerce further exacerbate the challenges.
