Pandora A/S chief executive Anders Colding Friis is to step down after the world’s biggest jewelry maker this week lost almost a quarter of its market value following a profit warning.
Colding Friis, 54, is to leave as of Aug. 31.
The Copenhagen-based company has started a search for a replacement, while it also hired former Body Shop CEO Jeremy Schwartz as chief operating officer. The shares rose more than 10 percent in early trading.
Struggling to keep up growth after a rapid global expansion, Pandora on Monday lowered its outlook for this year’s profit and sales, sending shares down 24 percent and sparking speculation about whether Friis would be able to keep his job.
The company yesterday said that it is beset by a range of problems, including weaker-than-expected sales of new charm bracelets and rising costs.
Friis at the start of the year sought to reset the company’s targets, seeking more “realistic” goals as its expansion slows.
While he yesterday said that he had been “a bit too optimistic,” he added that he still believes in the strategy he had laid out for Pandora.
“I don’t have a lot of regrets when it comes to the things we’ve done together at Pandora,” he said in a Bloomberg TV interview.
Friis’ departure would probably “be taken positively by the market as many eagerly awaited a reshuffle in Pandora’s management team,” Berenberg analyst Zuzanna Puszsaid in a note.
The company on Monday said that it expected sales to grow 4 to 7 percent in local currencies, down from a forecast of 7 to 10 percent.
It said that its profit margin on earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization would be about 32 percent, down from a prediction of 35 percent.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained