Leadership1 publisher3 min readPublished
Pandora opens $150 million Vietnam plant built on recycled gold and silver
Pandora opened a $150 million jewelry plant in Ho Chi Minh City that it says lifts manufacturing capacity 50% and cuts its carbon footprint 17%. Whether both figures hold as output grows depends less on the factory than on the recyclers and refiners that supply it.
The Board Room · Leadership desk
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What happened
- The Ho Chi Minh City site is built to make up to 60 million pieces of jewelry a year.
- Since August 2024 all new Pandora jewelry has used 100% recycled gold and silver, bought as refined grains from recyclers in Europe and Asia.
- Saleem H. Ali of the United Nations University said some suppliers could blend newly mined metal into recycled stock, a risk he said takes a lot of auditing to control.
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Why it matters
- constraint Up to 50% more output means up to 50% more certified recycled metal, so outside recyclers and refiners decide how far the expansion can grow while keeping the 100% recycled claim.
- exposure The recycled claim covers every new piece, so one refiner found blending in mined metal would put sourcing in doubt for the whole product line, well beyond the Vietnam plant.
- precedent With Lego and Pandora on the same road and Denmark's ambassador naming renewable access as a factor, clean-power availability is becoming a site test that later Danish entrants to Vietnam will be measured against.
Vietnam is an addition to Pandora's manufacturing network. Chief executive Berta de Pablos-Barbier said Pandora wanted to expand its manufacturing base after 37 years in Thailand, to gain flexibility and supply-chain resilience [4]. The 50% is growth in company-wide capacity [3]. The recycled metal came first: Pandora moved all new jewelry to 100% recycled gold and silver in August 2024 [12]. The company did not say how much of the 17% cut comes from the new plant's renewable power, or what baseline it is measured against [3].
Some scale helps. The plant cost $150 million and will make up to 60 million pieces a year [1][2], about $2.50 of capital per piece of annual capacity [1]. It employs 7,000 people [7], roughly $21,400 of investment per job [2]. If the 60 million pieces are the whole of the 50% increase, Pandora's existing network makes about 120 million pieces a year and the combined network about 180 million [3].
All of that output draws on the same supply. Pandora's factories receive small grains of refined metal from recyclers in Europe and Asia, recovered from items including medical equipment and old cutlery, said chief sustainability officer Mads Twomey-Madsen [13]. He also said recovering valuable metals from discarded products and waste is a challenge [17]. The raw material is growing. The world produced 62 million metric tons of e-waste in 2022, a figure projected to reach 82 million by 2030, according to the International Telecommunication Union and UNITAR [18]. Gold does not break down or rust, said Saleem H. Ali, who leads a program on critical minerals at the United Nations University [11]. "We still have gold from the ancient Egyptians, in pretty good shape," he said [19].
Ali's warning is the harder one for an operator. Some suppliers could add newly mined material into the mix, he said. "That involves a lot of auditing" [14]. Pandora's answer is process: it adopted Responsible Jewellery Council standards five years ago and uses independent auditors, Twomey-Madsen said [15]. I think that answer holds at today's volume. A network growing by half needs more certified metal. Each added refiner is another site to audit, and if the metal in each piece holds steady, purchases rise by up to 50% [4].
The power claim also depends on outside arrangements. The plant uses rooftop solar and plans to work with local solar farms, the company said [7]. Vietnam had Southeast Asia's largest installed solar and wind capacity at the end of 2024 but still relies heavily on coal [9]. Manufacturing uses half the country's energy [10]. Refining, the energy-intensive step of heating metal to remove impurities, happens before the grains reach Pandora; Twomey-Madsen called clean power across the whole chain, refining included, the ultimate goal [13][16]. Denmark's ambassador to Vietnam, Lina Gandløse Hansen, said access to renewable energy infrastructure is increasingly an "important factor" for Pandora and other Danish companies [6]. Lego's $1 billion factory, opened in 2025, is across the road [8].
De Pablos-Barbier pitched the plant as an example for the industry. "We are leading the way and we really hope that the rest follow," she said [20]. The site and power choices are made. The next consequence is in purchasing: whether recyclers and refiners in Europe and Asia can certify enough extra gold and silver for up to 60 million more pieces a year while keeping out the blending risk Ali described [2][14].
What to watch
- Whether Pandora signs the local solar-farm agreements it has described only as plans, and for how much of the plant's load.
- A disclosure from Pandora of the baseline behind the 17% footprint cut and how much of it comes from the plant's power.
- Any audit finding of newly mined metal at a Pandora refiner, or changes to its Responsible Jewellery Council certification.