Ho Chi Minh City: Pandora has opened a $150 million jewellery crafting facility in Vietnam, establishing its first production site outside Thailand and creating a second manufacturing base after 37 years of relying on a single country for jewellery production.
Located within the Vietnam-Singapore Industrial Park III, the 7.5-hectare facility has been designed for an eventual production capacity of up to 60 million jewellery pieces annually. At full scale, Pandora expects the plant to increase its overall manufacturing capacity by approximately 50 per cent. With the company selling 112 million pieces in 2025, the Vietnam operation is being developed as a significant part of its future global production network rather than as a small regional manufacturing unit.
Until now, Pandora’s three factories in Thailand produced all of the company’s jewellery. Vietnam becomes its fourth manufacturing facility worldwide and introduces geographic diversification into a production system that has historically been concentrated in Thailand. CEO Berta de Pablos-Barbier told Reuters that the facility is expected to initially represent around 15 per cent of Pandora’s global production capacity, potentially increasing to approximately one-third when fully scaled by 2030.
The project has also grown since it was originally announced. Pandora’s initial plans outlined an investment of around $100 million and more than 6,000 jobs. At the time of opening, the company placed the investment at $150 million and projected an eventual workforce of around 7,000 employees.
For Pandora, adding Vietnam provides greater flexibility in determining where future manufacturing capacity is created. It does not eliminate external risks, however. The United States remains Pandora’s largest market, making potential changes to US tariffs on Vietnamese goods relevant to the economics of the new manufacturing base. De Pablos-Barbier has positioned the investment as a long-term capacity decision built around the coming decade rather than short-term trade conditions.
The more immediate challenge is turning installed capacity into consistent jewellery production. The opening marked the manufacture of Pandora’s first jewellery piece in Vietnam, but the factory has not yet reached anything close to its eventual 60 million-piece annual capacity.
Workforce development is therefore central to the ramp-up. Pandora has established a Crafting Academy to transfer manufacturing knowledge between its experienced Thai operations and the new Vietnamese workforce. According to WWD, 25 experienced craftspeople from Thailand were brought in to train local recruits. The academy covers five areas and 35 skills, while developing an employee into a multiskilled craftsperson can require up to six months.
Around 700 craftspeople were working at the facility when it opened, with plans to reach approximately 1,000 by the end of the year and eventually around 7,000. The figures underline an important point about industrial jewellery manufacturing: physical factory capacity alone does not determine output. Skilled labour, training, repeatability and quality control determine how quickly that capacity can actually be utilised.
Initial production in Vietnam is focused on gold-plated jewellery, with WWD reporting that a personalisable dangle heart charm was the first piece produced at the site. Pandora also expects Vietnam eventually to support its planned platinum-plated jewellery range as the company expands its material mix. Platinum-plated production is initially being introduced in Thailand, however, meaning the future Vietnamese role should not be confused with current production.
Pandora describes the new factory as a state-of-the-art manufacturing facility incorporating advanced production technology and digital solutions. Publicly available information, however, does not provide enough detail to establish which specific manufacturing systems, machines or automation platforms are being deployed.
What is clearer is the industrial model being developed around them. Pandora is combining a significantly larger production footprint with structured cross-border skills transfer, creating a system intended to reproduce jewellery consistently across two manufacturing countries.
For a company operating at Pandora’s scale, this is a significant manufacturing challenge. Producing tens of millions of relatively small jewellery components requires dimensional and surface consistency, repeatable finishing and quality control across a rapidly expanding workforce. The technology story therefore extends beyond automation: training systems and process standardisation become manufacturing technologies in their own right when craftsmanship has to be replicated at industrial scale.
Sustainability has also been incorporated into the facility’s operating model. The building has achieved LEED Gold certification, while Pandora says the site will operate entirely on renewable electricity and manufacture jewellery using recycled silver and gold.
The recycled-metal strategy predates the Vietnam expansion. Pandora transitioned to 100 per cent recycled silver and gold for newly produced jewellery in August 2024, sourcing refined material from recycling streams in Europe and Asia.
Recycled precious metals can significantly reduce dependence on newly mined material, but traceability remains important. Once precious metal enters refining and remelting processes, establishing its original source from the finished material becomes difficult. Pandora says its supply chain uses third-party auditing and follows Responsible Jewellery Council standards.
The environmental equation also extends beyond the walls of the new factory. Precious-metal recovery and refining require energy before recycled gold or silver reaches the manufacturing plant. Pandora’s renewable electricity commitment therefore addresses the operation of the Vietnam facility, but does not by itself mean that every upstream stage of its metal supply chain is powered by renewable energy.
The wider Vietnamese energy landscape adds another layer. The country has built substantial solar and wind capacity, but coal remains an important part of its electricity system. Pandora is reportedly exploring additional options including on-site solar generation and a potential solar-farm partnership, although these remain prospective initiatives rather than evidence of the facility’s entire present energy supply.
For the jewellery manufacturing industry, the importance of Pandora’s Vietnam investment lies in its scale and structure. The company is simultaneously attempting to diversify production geographically, train thousands of new craftspeople, increase global capacity, expand its material portfolio and maintain recycled-metal and renewable-energy commitments.
The real measure of the $150 million investment will therefore come after the opening. Pandora now has to demonstrate how quickly a newly trained workforce can move towards industrial-scale output while maintaining the quality and repeatability expected from a brand producing more than 100 million jewellery pieces annually.
If that transition succeeds, Vietnam will represent more than Pandora’s fourth factory. It will demonstrate how one of the world’s largest jewellery businesses can take a manufacturing model built over decades in one country and reproduce it at scale in another — creating a second production engine for its next phase of global growth.