Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the conference call for Pandora's Q2 2022 results. I'm John Bäckström from the investor relations team. I'm joined here in Copenhagen today by our CEO, Alexander Lacik, and our CFO, Anders Boyer, and the rest of the IR team, Kristian Godiksen and Adam Fuglsang. There will be a Q&A session at the end of the call. As usual, please limit your questions to two at a time, and then kindly get back into the queue if you have additional questions. Slide two, please. Please pay attention to the disclaimer on slide two, and then turn to slide three. Alexander, please go ahead. Thank you, John, and welcome everyone who are joining us today. I'm happy to start out by saying that we have had another record revenue quarter. In fact, it's the third consecutive record quarter. Compared to a clean base in 2019, the organic growth in Q2 was 17%. This despite China dragging down the growth by seven percentage points. In fact, halfway into the year, we can say that we have performed very well and managed to absorb significant headwinds in a number of areas, including COVID-restricted China, ceasing our business in Russia and Belarus, high inflation and cost pressure on energy and raw. We consider the growth to be of high quality, underpinned by strong performance in our core Moments platform. The execution of our growth strategy, Phoenix, is progressing very well. As you know, we are unfolding a number of strategic initiatives, including things like network expansion, new store concept development, and a new customer loyalty program, just to name a few. These are all on track. Our business model continues to deliver profitable and cash-generating growth. In the quarter, EBIT margin landed at 22.1%, and the underlying EBIT margin development was strong. Overall, and in spite of the macro headwinds, trading in the quarter was in line with our plans, and we're on track to deliver as guided. Today, we're also proud to announce the launch of lab-created diamonds in North America. This is also our first collection set in 100% recycled silver and gold. The launch is a transformative move, both in terms of business and sustainability. Now, let's move to slide four, please. Well, key takeaway from this slide is that our guidance remains unchanged. For the full year of 2022, organic growth is expected to be in the 4%-6% range, while EBIT margin is expected to be 25%-25.5%. We'll provide a more detailed perspective on our assumptions later in the call. There is no doubt that there is elevated uncertainty in the world around us, but we believe we can navigate this within our guidance. Slide six, please. Before we dive into the Q2 results, I'd like to give a brief update on the four main building blocks of our growth strategy, Phoenix. We're executing strongly, which confirms the potential ahead of us. The first and most important growth pillar is driving higher brand desire. We continue to see solid traction during key gifting periods, most recently Mother's Day, and this is an encouraging sign of brand relevance. Collaborations with other big brands, such as Disney, is a way to build awareness and drive brand desirability more. Finally, the brand experience we offer in our concept stores and online is, of course, essential to drive higher brand desire. Today, our customers enjoy the shopping experience, and we believe it sets us apart in the affordable luxury segment. We'll continue to evolve the shopping experience. Secondly, in the design pillar, the focus is on driving the core while fueling the brand with more. Pandora Moments is the core of Pandora and continues to show its vitality. It delivers solid growth helped by innovations such as the new Marvel x Pandora, for instance. To fuel the brand with more, we last year relaunched Pandora ME, and today we are fueling with even more with the launch of our lab-created diamonds in North America, the world's largest diamond market, but more on that a little bit later. Moving on, the third growth pillar is personalization. Here, we're improving the omni-channel experience to offer consumers a more personalized path to purchase journey. Our online channel performance continues to be very good. The testing of our new store concept is well underway, and the launch of our new customer loyalty program in France is off to a strong start. The fourth and final pillar is about growing our core markets. This includes both increasing our network and growing the existing one. As we will talk more about later, our network development is starting to become more visible in the numbers, driving profitable growth. Slide seven, please. As you know, Moments including collaborations is today 75% of our business, and it's our clear ambition to continue to grow it. As part of the Phoenix growth initiatives, we're also creating new platforms alongside Moments with a launch and leverage mindset. This means we're putting more support behind new initiatives than we did in the past, with the aim that a new platform should reach at least 5% of revenue. We have announced two new platforms, our lab-created diamonds collection, Pandora Brilliance, which I will go into more details with shortly, and Pandora ME. ME is aimed at Gen Z, which has gained solid traction in continental European markets, but still need to gain stronger traction in, for instance, U.S. and U.K. It's clear that establishing new and enduring platforms takes time. The model with test markets works well, as we have done with Brilliance in the U.K. As the platforms develop and mature, we are closely monitoring the progress to adjust as we go, as well as assessing the true potential. Next slide, please. Our largest platform, Moments, was our key driver of growth in Q2, delivering a 4% sell-out growth versus 2021, and 11% versus 2019. The performance was supported by strong Mother's Day trading. Moments was also supported by collaborations, not least the new Marvel collaboration with Disney. Collabs continued the very strong traction from Q1 and was up 34% in Q2 versus last year. There are more products from the Marvel universe launching later this year. Next slide, please. As I mentioned, today we announced that we're launching Diamonds by Pandora in North America. It will be traded under the category name Diamonds by Pandora, and this is to mark that we anticipate further collections to be launched under the larger umbrella concept. This is another important milestone on our mission to democratize the jewelry market, of which diamonds is a significant part. We have generated important learnings from the U.K. test launch, and that truly helped us sharpen the North America launch plan. We're very excited about this opportunity. The diamond jewelry is a DKK 600 billion market globally, and lab-created diamonds are a growing part of that. North America is not only where we have our largest geographical presence, it's also the largest market for lab-created diamonds. We believe we have a unique position with our retail footprint, brand awareness, and understanding of our customer base. Diamonds by Pandora will be available in 269 stores in North America and online starting August 25. Prices will start at $300, with stones from 0.15 up to one carat. There are two things which I'd like to highlight with this launch. First, we're bringing a very attractive design to our customers at an accessible price point. We continue to focus on the self-purchaser rather than the bridal market, and we believe our concept is far more unique in this space. Secondly, this launch marks significant progress on our strategic ambition to be a low carbon and circular business and leading our industry on sustainability. The diamonds are grown, cut, and polished using only renewable energy. It's also the first collection set in 100% recycled silver and gold from Pandora. All of this results in a very low carbon footprint. Our diamonds have a carbon footprint of only 5% that of a mined diamond. In the press release we sent out this morning, you can see additional data points on the strong sustainability profile. I think we're helping set the bar for the jewelry industry when it comes to sustainability and show where the industry can go in the future. Next slide, please. Now let's have a look at our core markets. Our U.S. business continued to deliver strong growth versus 2019. As expected, it's down versus 2021 since we're comping the unusual effects from last year's stimulus checks. We have said all along that we expect the U.S. market to slow down this year, and that was included in our guidance. Our key European markets had very strong growth in Q2, and all of them delivered double-digit growth versus 2021. France and Germany represent great oppor... Growth opportunities for Pandora since our market share is well below that of more established markets like Italy and U.K., for instance. Australia was up three points versus 21, and we expect Australia to be a bigger source of growth in the second half of the year since they were severely impacted by COVID-19 during that period of last year, hence cycling a weaker base. China was weak as expected and severely impacted by reduced traffic due to COVID-19 restrictions. Now let's have a quick look at the rest of Pandora on the next slide, please. Rest of Pandora accounts for 28% of the overall business and had an organic growth in the quarter of 26% versus 21. The biggest markets here are Spain, Mexico, and Canada. I want to give you a bit more color on these markets since they represent good opportunities for future growth. Spain had revenue of almost quarter of a billion DKK in the quarter, equal to France in 2021. Spain had revenue of DKK 900 million, but trending higher this year. Last year, we converted 44 franchise shop-in-shops to Pandora-owned with very good results. Mexico had revenue in the quarter of DKK 185 million, which was more than China, in fact, and delivered 49% organic growth in the quarter versus 2021. Mexico is approaching DKK 800 million of revenue in the year, and we still have an opportunity to expand our network. In Q2, we opened up 25 shop-in-shops in LATAM, of which 13 actually were in Mexico. Canada delivered 44% organic growth in the quarter. We have strong opportunities here as well to grow our market share and brand awareness. Next slide, please. At the Capital Markets Day last year, we told you about how developing the network is an important source of revenue growth. I want to follow up on this since we're starting to see meaningful incremental revenue from our network expansion and forward integration. We expect to open net 100- 150 stores until 2023, and store openings are EBIT margin accretive. The stores we opened in 2021 are now tracking at roughly 40% EBIT margin in the first half of 2022. There's also a short payback of roughly one year on the CapEx investment, and new lease contracts are in most cases quite flexible and include regular break clauses. Forward integration added 1 percentage point to revenue in Q2, mainly driven by store acquisitions in the U.S. We always assess potential takeovers on a case-by-case basis. If we do a deal, it's roughly EBIT margin neutral and has a short payback. Next slide, please. As mentioned, one of the key growth pillars in our strategy is personalization, creating a true omni-channel experience. As part of this, we're testing a new store concept called Evoke. So far, we have opened up 12 stores across five of our key markets, being U.S., China, U.K., Italy, and Germany. It's still early days, but we can see that customers spend more time in the store, and this obviously opens up for more engagement opportunities with our sales staff. The new stores have outperformed during peak periods, and the sell-out growth in the new stores is also slightly higher than in our other stores. This indicates to us that Evoke concept works very well. We're planning to open up 35 more stores in this, Evoke stores, I should say, in the second half of the year, and then we'll scale it further in the next year. Next slide, please. Before I hand it over to Anders, I would like to comment on another key enabler in the personalization journey, our new customer loyalty program called My Pandora. We told you about the launch in France last quarter, and so far it has showed strong results. Roughly a quarter of a million consumers have already signed up, and more than 60% of them have already made a purchase. While it's early days, we have also noted improvement in basket size, which is up by 18%, and units per transaction up by 27%. Now, these data points will need more time to mature, but clearly early days, the business case continues to seem very sound. We get access to quality consumer data more effectively, and this allows for creating a stronger bond to the brand. We can personalize our marketing activities and also target our media efforts much better. Finally, My Pandora is also a key enabler in developing our omni-channel experience, both on and offline, as it actually allows our store staff to easily identify consumer interest and purchase history. We will launch My Pandora in more markets in 2023. On that note, I hand over to Anders for a closer look at the numbers. Thank you, Alexander. Please go to slide 16. The key message for our second quarter financials is that they were in line with our expectations. I'll cover a bit more on revenue and EBIT on the following slide. On this slide, I'll just give a few comments on some other KPIs. Our gross margin remained strong at 76.4% in the quarter, and that's despite 180 basis points of headwinds versus last year from commodity prices and a temporary drag from forward integration that we have made. When I say that, it also means that the gross margin on a run rate basis should be higher than in the second quarter when we look forward. You probably remember that during the last quarters, we have deliberately built inventories to mitigate the risk of supply chain disruptions, and we did that in the second quarter as well. We are now sort of broadly where we want to be on inventory levels, but we do expect inventories to increase a bit further in the third quarter as usual as we prepare for the peak trading season in Q4. The decision to increase inventories will of course have a temporary negative impact on the cash conversion. We have received some questions about whether sort of the higher inventories represent a risk going forward on discounting. I think we should address that upfront and say a clear no. The inventories that we have built is on our high runners. This is a sort of a working capital question only if I can put it like that. Alexander's already told you about the investments that we're making in our business as part of Phoenix and that is also visible in the CapEx level. As you can see on the slide here, CapEx is doubled in percent of revenue versus last year. Just finally, I would like to highlight a number which is not on this slide, and that's the announced share buybacks and the dividend that we will be doing in 2022. The total payout to shareholders that we have announced equals around 10% of our current market cap. Go to the next slide, please. Slide 17. That's the revenue performance in the second quarter that we have on this slide. As you know, we guide on organic growth, and it came in at three points in the second quarter, and that's the black bar in the middle of this bridge. As Alexander said, that equals 17% organic growth versus 2019. The organic growth was driven both by sell-out of two points. That's the first light gray box on the bridge here. Network expansion adding two points also to the growth. As Alexander mentioned, growing the network is a core part of the Phoenix strategy, and it is becoming visible in the numbers. As you know, we have ceased business in Russia and Belarus, and this drags down the organic growth by around 1% in the second quarter together with a couple of other minor factors. Forward integration also supported revenue growth by 1%. It's mainly stores in the U.S., and the 1%, shown here as forward integration, is the part of forward integration where some kind of goodwill is paid, and therefore it is not included in the organic growth. Finally, when you move right in the bridge here to get to the 10% total reported revenue growth, you can see that there's quite some foreign exchange tailwind of six points in the quarter. Go to slide 18 please, and the EBIT margin bridge. There's quite some moving parts in this EBIT margin bridge in the quarter, but the key message that we want to pass on is what we have in the dotted box in the middle here, showing that there's a slight improvement in the underlying EBIT margin versus the second quarter of last year. That improvement came from a combination of operating leverage and from some gross margin efficiencies, which was then sort of partially offset by our continued reinvestment in the business. This is, in essence, how we see our business. As you know, there's some operating leverage as we grow, leverage on our cost base, and then we reinvest some of that or all of that leverage in strengthening the business and driving future growth. Outside of the dotted box, we have isolated some temporary factors impacting the margin, both last year to the left and this year to the right. If you look at the elements to the left, I want to give just a comment on the bucket that's called Net Impact of Store Closures and U.S. Stimulus. Last year, the EBIT margin was impacted by these opposing factors that last year lifted the EBIT margin by roughly net one percentage points due to the elevated growth based on the U.S. government stimulus packages that we saw last year. Obviously, it's not exact science, and you should review this one point as directional only, but there's no doubt that net-net it's a drag on the EBIT margin compared to last year. If you look at the elements to the right, that's the temporary factors this year. Most importantly, there is a drag from forward integration as we bought back inventory at wholesale value. This is, as most of you probably know, a three-six months temporary drag when we take over a partner store. Let's go to slide 20 please, and the guidance, the 2022 guidance. The second quarter trading was in line with our plan, and we keep our guidance unchanged. I just want to stress what Alexander Lacik already says, that the macroeconomic outlook obviously is associated with elevated uncertainty. The overall guidance is unchanged, but we have made some smaller tweaks to the underlying sort of sources of growth, and I'll just give a comment on that. On the one hand, we have increased the guidance from network expansion from one to two points last quarter to two points. On the other hand, we see a slightly lower sell-in to the partner channel, and that includes the fact that we have ceased the business in Russia and Belarus, but there's also a couple of other smaller factors. As you can see, it's in the roundings and decimals, and between -1% and 0% impact on the organic growth this year. We've also made some smaller changes to the directional growth assumptions. That's the assumptions, as you can see, in the pink box on the slide here. The short version of the assumptions in the pink box is that we have adjusted the growth assumptions for the U.S. down a touch, and then we have the assumptions for the rest of Pandora up a touch. The total is the same. The guidance is unchanged. Another thing we just want to highlight as sort of ahead of the second half of the year is that the sources of growth in the second half will be different than in the first half of the year. There will be some shift in which countries are contributing to growth. Europe will obviously be comping a more normal second half of 2021 without COVID closures. Then on the other hand, Australia will have quite easy comps due to the lockdowns, especially in the third quarter of last year. Then China will also be facing easier comps but will still be a drag on the total Pandora growth in the second half of the year. Let's move to the EBIT margin on slide 21. The EBIT margin guidance is unchanged, as well. The fourth quarter will be the most profitable quarter of the year in line with the normal seasonality, and that should probably not be a surprise. I want to highlight that due to a bit of phasing on both revenue and cost, the Q4 margin is expected to be relatively stronger than last year and the third quarter margin a little bit lower. In reality, it's more like sort of normal. If you look back in the past and not just back to last year, then the seasonality we are getting into is actually just more normal for Pandora. I just wanted to highlight that. Slide 22 and the implied guidance for the rest of the year. The 4%-6% organic growth for the full year implies organic growth for the rest of the year of between -1% and +2%. That's what you can see in the upper part of the slide. In the lower part you can see that this is equal to between 12 and 16 points, versus 19 in the second half of the year. That's just two things we wanted to mention here. First of all, this is important, the lower end of the guidance is most likely to come into play only if we see a further worsening of the macroeconomic environment. Secondly, we want to highlight that in terms of growth versus 2019, then the third quarter is expected to be lower than Q4, and this is also what we saw last year where the Q4 growth was six points higher than the third quarter. Then as you can see in the first bullet about EBIT margin on the slide here, then the implied EBIT margin for the rest of the year is 27%-28%, and thereby roughly 50-150 basis points above last year. With that, I'll hand it back to Alexander, and please go to slide 24. Thanks, Anders. Quickly summarize, Q2 was the third straight quarter with a record revenue, which we're very pleased with. Execution of our strategy, Phoenix, is progressing well with many initiatives. We saw profitable growth in the quarter, and we left our guidance unchanged, as Anders just went through, despite the challenging business environment. We're launching Diamonds by Pandora in North America, an important milestone, on our mission to democratize the jewelry market. Finally, I'm delighted to share with you that we found our new Chief Marketing Officer, Mary Carmen Gasco-Buisson, to help us achieve our growth ambitions. Mary Carmen Gasco-Buisson brings standout experience in building, expanding, and turning around global consumer brands, and I'm confident that she will be a key contributor in doing just that. She'll be joining us later in the fall. On that note, we're ready for the Q&A session. Operator, please go ahead. Thank you. If you have a question for the speakers, please press five star on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press five star again. We'll have a brief pause while questions are being registered. The first question is from the line of Fredrik Iversen from ABG. Please go ahead, your line will now be unmuted. Thank you very much. Hi, Alexander and Anders. I've got two questions to Anders, I believe, and first one on the inventory level, you stated you plan to increase that in Q3 further, which will probably take you to some 17% as a share of sales. Where do you expect that ratio to sit in the end of Q4? That's my first question. Then the second one on the margin guidance, because in Q1 you helped us a little bit with to quantify the headwinds from inflation. Have you done any changes to those assumptions? Reason for asking is partly that raw material prices are down, I guess, 6-7% since then. I would expect some tailwinds from lower raw mats since you weren't fully hedged for especially Q3 and Q4. That's the second question. All right. Thank you, Fredrik, for those two questions. Maybe let me just start with the last one. In Q1, we said that there will be a total of DKK 200 million in half inflation impact and half sort of extraordinary costs. The half and the extraordinary cost was related to the ceasing of business in Russia and Belarus. Then the other DKK 50 million was related to the COVID-19 measures in Thailand. On the first bucket, the DKK 100 million of cost, it's true that the energy prices and some raw material prices are down a bit on. The big one silver or the big ones silver and gold we're hedging so roughly one year forward. The decline that we've seen in silver prices which is the main metal that we've seen since I guess was it June or July that it started will only help us from some middle-ish 2023 going forward. Just elaborating a touch on that the silver prices in our guidance for this year and that number is again fixed because of the hedging that we're doing is just around $25. With the current silver price just a touch above 20 when I looked at it this morning, $20, then that gives $5 of tailwind as a run rate in a year's time, and that's almost 150 basis points of margin tailwind compared to 2022 on a run rate basis. It is meaningful money. Net-net for this year, the DKK 100 million that we announced back in May is pretty much unchanged. On the inventories, you should expect that inventories by the end of this year is lower than the number that we're sitting with going out of Q2. We are already building up and producing ahead of peak season going out of the second quarter. We'll continue doing that in the third quarter, and then we'll sell a lot of that during the fourth quarter, as usual. I think we'll end with an inventory level that is, in percent of revenue, higher than last year, but not into the 16.9% level that we saw going out of the second quarter. Perfect. Thanks, Anders. Very clear. The next question will be from the line of Martin Brenøe from Nordea. Please go ahead. Your line will now be unmuted. Hi. Thank you so much for taking my questions, and congrats with another record quarter. I have two questions, and then I'll jump back in the line, please. The first question would be, can you comment on anything on the momentum in the quarter or perhaps you have previously said something about, you know, I guess you got the July numbers, so any comments on current trading would be highly appreciated. My second question would be, you have so many things going on right now, and I guess that you cannot spend your management time on anything or everything on equal basis. Can you just help me understand what's taking most of your time and your resources at the moment? Thank you. I'll start out, Martin. Thanks for those two questions. Yeah, on the current momentum in trading, we don't see any major signs of a softening consumer sentiment. All of our retail metrics, if you go through them, basket size, traffic conversion, are staying intact. That's important to say. Of course, when we do go out this morning and confirm our guidance, we are both taking sort of the momentum going out of the second quarter into consideration. We have taken the trading in July into consideration. We have taken the trading all the way up until yesterday into consideration. That's important to say. I think we would like to stress that we have specifically said that in order to end in the low end of our guidance, we need to see a worsening of the environment compared to where we are today. I hope that helps. Okay. It does. Thanks. Hi, Martin. It's Alexander here. It's a great question. I got the same question from the board yesterday, so it's top of mind. In simple terms, it's very much what we laid out in the Phoenix strategies. There is a huge focus on the base platform, so Moments and innovation and execution of our Moments platform. That is the number one priority for us. The second priority, I would say, is the introduction of the Diamonds by Pandora in North America. That's been a big focus because it is an important step for us. Third, as we alluded to in the presentation up front here, is network development, which includes opening new stores, relocating to better locations of existing network, as well as there's been a fair amount of activity on forward integration recently. Fourth point is we continue the digital development, and there are two strands to that. One is the consumer facing, like the loyalty program, which I mentioned, and then there's enterprise development when it comes to ERP and a few of our kind of core systems that we are still working on upgrading. I think what's different this year probably from the last, let's say, 18 months or so, is that last year we were thinking a lot on what comes after Programme NOW and of course, that eventually led up to the Phoenix program. Now, my sense is that we moved much more into focusing on execution of the Phoenix program. We're very restrictive in adding new things to the list, but we're focused on delivering the stuff that we have in front of us. If you remember from the Phoenix program, we said there were kind of four growth pillars. We're kind of doubling down on those and really not trying to get distracted with, you know, M and A is one topic obviously, which is always out there, but we've kind of refrained from that, and now we're focused on executing the Phoenix plan. I don't know if that helps, but that's kind of what I would see from my vantage point. Oh, it's very clear. Thank you so much, Alexander. I'll jump back in the line. Thank you. The next question will be from the line of Lars Topholm from Carnegie. Please go ahead. Your line will now be unmuted. Yes, a couple of questions on my side. One goes to slide 10, because one way of expressing temporary store closures is, of course, what percentage of stores were closed. I get slightly concerned when I look at organic growth and how many more open stores you have in the quarter. I mean, an example, if 60% of German stores were closed in Q2 last year, it means Q2 this year, mathematically you have 150% more open stores, but your organic growth is only 18%. In Italy, mathematically, you have 20% more open stores, you only grow 15%. Likewise in France, you have 89% more open stores, but only grow 13%. In France you're in fact down versus 2019. I wonder if there's something I'm missing or your like-for-like is contracting significantly in these markets. Then a question on what you just mentioned, Anders, on your full year guidance, just to make sure I understand it correctly. If macro deteriorates, there could be downside to guidance or is it if current trading deteriorates, i.e., is guidance based on current trading continuing unchanged? In that connection, what should we specifically expect for the U.S. where if I look at last year, your peak was probably in Q2. Does that mean we should assume that the U.S. momentum has troughed in Q2 and now should improve? Thanks. On the first question, Lars, then we would have to get into an exercise which maybe we can do in a separate call. There are a couple of assumptions one need to now be mindful of, because traffic obviously will shift between physical stores and online, as you know, and that varies in different countries to a varying degree. Just kind of assuming there's a linear relationship between a store open or closed and the revenue will sit in there probably isn't entirely correct. I mean, it's a more complex question than to answer here. We certainly do not see a like for like crash like you hinted. I think that it's, you know, it's sound growth that we're experiencing in continental Europe. Of course, helped by the fact that some of the stores were closed last year. It's not as simple as taking those percentages that you threw back at us. I'm happy to kind of have that in a separate session, so we can try to do some intelligent math on that. I think that. Yeah. Building on that, too. I understand that, Alexander. If I can just maybe ask in a less complex way. If I just take your revenue in Italy and France, then in Italy you are now 18% up versus Q2 2019. Previous quarter you were 32% up versus the same quarter in 2019. In France, you're -4%, you were +16% in the previous quarter. Full respect of shifts between channels, et cetera, but why shouldn't I interpret those numbers as if you're losing momentum, at least in those two markets? Let me start out with Germany, which is probably the most extreme. It's true that organic growth in Germany was 18%. In Germany last year, we saw quite some high sell-in to a partner that we operated with. A franchise partner that was operating with an online business. We have been scaling that down this year. If you actually look at sell-out, organic growth in Germany was 18%. If you actually look at sell-out year-over-year in Germany, it was +42%, and that number is maybe easier to relate to when you look at the store numbers and closures in Germany last year. If you go sort of through each of the countries like that, then there's sort of specific stories like that. It is quite cumbersome still to do year-over-year comparisons, not least due to the pandemic impact last year. Germany being the one that stands out the most. In France, we've actually been doing quite okay in our own channels in the second quarter, the partner channel less so. We did have one of our larger partners that ran into some issues, and I think it was actually fraud issues in his business. That impact is that business getting to a, I don't know whether it was a complete standstill, but at least very low level both from sell-in and organic growth perspective in the second quarter that impacts the number that we have sitting on slide number 10. I think all of these numbers is in line with what we have expected. That's why we go out and actually confirm the guidance today. Specifically on Europe, what we do with the guidance today, we are notching that up a little bit, U.S. down a bit, as I said, and then Europe and the rest of the world up a bit. All of this is exactly in line with our plans. What was that. Oh, that was current trading. That was the other question. Yeah, I should probably qualify a bit what I said around the macro. There's already a bit of macro headwind built into the guidance that we have shown in that pink box on slide number 20. That already sits in there. For what I think we probably rather say it would have to be a very visible and significant change in the macro environment in order for us to point towards the lower end of the guidance. That I think it'll probably be. It would be quite a change compared to what we see in Q2 and going out of Q2 and after Q2. It would have to be quite a change to the trading environment before we look towards the low end of the guidance. That's fair. Of course, I understand you can't tell us everything. I'm just still a little uncertain. I mean, I understand current trading is part of why you guide us, your guidance. I would still be extremely curious to know if current trading is better or worse or on par with what you saw in Q2, because that makes us better able to sort of define what we think instead of just penciling in what you guys say, with all respect, of course. I wonder if you can give some comment on current trading versus Q2, if it's better or worse or in line. If you go back to Q1, you know, the Q1 announcement, then what we said, we guided zero-two points of organic growth for the rest of the year, meaning Q2, Q3, Q4. We are a notch above that in the realized numbers for Q2. We keep the comment unchanged. That, and that means basically that we are trading around that, a couple of points plus in terms of organic growth. Q3 might be a notch below that, Q4 a notch above that. We are just in that territory, exactly like what we said when we came with the Q1 announcement three months ago. Then you asked about the U.S. The comp base is the most difficult one in the quarter that we have behind us now in the second quarter. I'm just refreshing my mind online here. If you look at the U.S. organic growth last year in Q2, Q3, Q4, it was in sort of round numbers. It was 80% growth in Q2 versus 2019. 60, just around 60% in the third quarter and 40% in Q4. The comp base is becoming a little bit easier as we go through the year in the U.S. I understand. I'm really. It's probably me being incredibly stupid here, I still don't understand the answer to my question about current trading. I understand what you say about what you imply for the rest of the year, the question is, has current trading been better or worse or in line with Q2? I think what I actually just said is that it's in line with Q2. Okay. Fantastic. What we said all the way back in Q2. I just didn't understand it, Anders. That we have guided 0%-2% organic growth in both Q2, Q3 and Q4. What we delivered in the second quarter. Okay. That's where we are heading. Crystal clear. Thank you very much, guys, for taking my questions. The next question will be from the line of Bilal Aziz from Citi. Please go ahead. Your line will now be unmuted. Hi. Thank you for taking my questions. I have two questions, please. The first one on the promotional environment. Could you give us some color on how promotional activity evolved, particularly in the third quarter so far? We saw some good level of discounts, particularly on your U.S. website. Wanted to understand how that promotional activity has evolved in third quarter so far. The second one is on pricing. You alluded to small price increases in your previous conference call. Have you passed on any slight price increases or has there been any meaningful changes in the mix? Any color there would be helpful. Thank you. Yeah. I think we need to be careful in these calls of entering into the quarter in which we're trading. I know why you're asking, but it's you know, this is a Q2 announcement, so I would have to just bear that in mind. You will have details on Q3 trading when we come to the Q3 announcement. The promotional in general, if I look at the first half of the year, we are not increasing our promotional. We are in fact continue to detox in a couple of places. In general, if I would do a global assessment, we probably have less promotional pressure overall so far this year. Then on pricing, as we said in the last call, we'd be looking to make some surgical moves. We have done a few, but it's on a limited amount of items. We're not touching opening price points. That you know, so that's part of our strategy. It's important for us to remain an affordable brand. Therefore, also as Anders said, the cost increase on the supply side is not major. We don't feel pressured to pass on big price increases like, you know, we're reading about in newspaper some other companies and brands are forced to do. We do not have that type of pressure. Staying with kind of our strategic pricing strategy is important and we have made some surgical moves on certain items. Typically, you know, a little bit higher priced items, a little bit more of the complex items. Thank you. Just to follow up on promotional activity. So when you say that you are facing less promotional pressure, are you talking about the number of days or the intensity, i.e. the magnitude of promotion? I mean, we have. The promotional calendar nowadays is a bit more, let's say, standardized across. Whereas in the past, there was a lot of different things going on across the globe. With our global merchandising function, we have now tried to be a bit more, fact-based around what works and what not. In general, it's the intensity is similar to last year, give or take, but the number of days in a few geographies have been reduced. Thank you. The next question will be from the line of Klaus Kehl from Nykredit. Please go ahead, your line will now be unmuted. Yeah. Hello. It's Klaus Kehl from Nykredit. A question related to this, Diamonds by Pandora, I guess it's a pretty interesting product and it's a big market that you can tap into. I must say that at least I have some problems when I try to think about what this could turn into over, let's say, the next two or three years. Could you give us any feedback from retailers or consumers in the U.S. and anything you could share with us to get a feeling for what this could turn out to be? Thank you very much. Yeah. Of course, we haven't launched it yet in the U.S., so there's no consumer feedback other than what we've done in the research phase a year and a half ago. I don't have any kind of live data from that. We have of course from our franchise partners and some of the wholesale partners that will carry the line. There's some feedback that we have received, but there's nothing, you know, out of the ordinary, I would say. There's been more discussion on, let's say, the business model, given the inventory level that, you know, the value of the inventory is a little bit different than from the normal Pandora business, let's say. There's been some conversations on how we can manage that in a smart way. That's kind of on the back room conversations. From an expectation, I mean, what we've said for any of our new platforms, our expectations is for that to be sustainable, it needs to hit at around about 5% share of business. This is not exact science, but at that level, we'd have critical mass for the collection to, you know, so that we can afford supporting it with marketing, supporting it with the appropriate amount of space in the stores, and appropriate attention from the organization, let's say. Some collections will get there faster than others. That's kind of a general statement. If we look at the diamond market, I mean, it's a Bain study suggesting that the size of the global market is roughly 84 billion or DKK 600 billion that I was mentioning. Of that, the largest market in the world is the U.S. Here, there are some different data points flying around, but it's at least 1/3, if not more, of that 84 sits in the U.S. Of that piece today, there's 6%-8% of the market is in lab-created diamonds. If you then look at the growth rates in the last few years, lab-created diamonds have been growing at a 3x clip that of mined. What all of that tells us is that there's a sizable market already established out there. It's growing fast. Based on the research which we've done, we've seen that in particular Millennials, and you know, even younger generations, they think the aspect of the sustainability profile or emissions profile, if you may, is something that features as they think about entering this category. So I think those are kind of the macro reasons, if you may, from our side, suggesting that this is a very interesting space to play. I'd like to also point out that the diamond market historically has been focused and geared towards the bridal and engagement market. So that's a crowded space, which is one of the reasons we've kind of gone a little bit to a different place where we are focused on the self-purchaser. We don't think that a woman has to wait for the guy to get on his knee and pass the rock and then make this eternal commitment. That market of course is there and has been there for a long time. We are more kind of appealing to the women that want to manifest you know good things in life on their own. They're not dependent on that. That's the concept which we know resonates really well with our audience. I hope that helps to clarify. It's a big ambition with jumping on a horse in the race that seems to be running faster than the other ones. Then we'll see how it goes. Great. Thank you very much. As a reminder, please press five star on telephone keypad to ask a question. The next question will be from the line of Fredrik Wild from Jefferies. Please go ahead, your line will now be unmuted. Good morning, Alexander Lacik, and thanks for all that. First I'm very sorry to return to the top, but on those current trading in Q3, I guess could you confirm on relatively underlying trends, maybe versus 2019 in recent weeks. Could you just confirm that there's been no substantial change in momentum on that underlying basis in the U.S., Europe and China as major markets? Secondly, I guess, for Q2, the increase in marketing as a% of sales versus 2019 seems to have stepped up quite substantially versus Q1. Is that a good guide for the remainder of the year to the marketing spend? Thank you. I can knock off the last question first. Now I think we've had this question before. You cannot look at the marketing spending quarter by quarter. That's not how we build our plans. We build annual plans, and there will be shifts, depending a little bit when different activities, different calendar effects, different initiatives when they fall. The guidance that we have given in the past that we'll be cruising around the 13%-15% mark of revenue still holds. It may be a little bit high in some quarters and a little bit lower in others. There's no strategic change in that respect. Thanks for the question. I'll give it another shot on the current trading. The guidance that we've given this morning is between -1% and +2% organic growth for Q3 and Q4. As I just said, in order to end in the low end of that range, something new would need to happen compared to where we are currently trading. If you add those two statements together, that also then you say, well, then you are currently trading more like the +2, which is correct. Great. Thank you. The next question is from the line of Erwan Rambourg from HSBC. Please go ahead. Your line will all be unmuted. Hi there. Thank you very much for taking my questions. First of all, on the U.S., can you talk about consumer demand and what you're seeing in terms of differences in demand, either by price point or by products or by regions within the U.S.? What are the weak areas and what are the stronger areas? The second question is around gross margin. I think you were quite clear on the fact that we'd see benefits from raw material prices more in 2023 than this year. Can you talk about the outlook for gross margin in H2 relative to what you mentioned about promotional activity, possibly FX, raw material prices, anything else in terms of moving parts for H2 to understand where the gross margin can end up at? Thank you. I can take the first part there on the U.S. I'd just like to take us back one step. Last year, of course, we had the stimulus checks and we got an abnormal growth in the market, which everybody's fully aware of. We have all along said that we expect the market to decline coming into this year, you know, because the stimulus money isn't simply there. What we look at, we track retail metrics, things like traffic, conversion rate, basket size, UPT, average price. We also look a little bit geographically how this pans out. What you can see on the U.S. data, I'm talking Q2 specifically, we have seen a decline in traffic, which today, whether I can attribute that to inflation or whether this is the lack of stimulus checks, you know, I don't know. My guess would be that it's more related to the lack of stimulus checks. There may be a component of inflation in there. If I look at kind of the performance in other parts of the world, which also are faced with the not necessarily stimulus checks, but the inflationary pressures, we can't really see anything in our data so far that would suggest that that's creeping in. My assumption is right now that U.S. is more an effect of the lack of the, let's say, the comp of the stimulus checks. Generally speaking, all the other metrics are quite strong. Geographically, it's not any major variations, to be honest, in the quarter, then we would have to look at that over a slightly longer period of time. There's nothing there really that kind of goes in any strange direction, if you may. U.S. is somehow performing as we expected. Just maybe a follow-up, looking at the lack of stimulus checks this year versus last year. Presumably, that probably helped the entry level last year. Is it fair to assume that the higher price points are more resilient this year than the entry level price points? I don't see any changes. That's not just for the U.S., because that was one of the things we also said. Okay, if there's recession, maybe people are still buying a gift, but they're going for, you know, something that's a little bit less priced in the assortment. I can't see that in Europe nor in the U.S., to be honest. Okay. And then we had some- Interesting. Thank you. Thank you. Some data, I think, was it Bank of America? That was talking about share of wallet, which suggested, and this is also for the most recent period, which suggested that in fact, you know, our customers continues to spend the proportion that they used to spend inside our shops, and in fact, there's even some months where it's increasing a touch. But I wouldn't write too much around that. I mean, at least we can say that we're minimally holding our own. Right. Okay. To your question about the gross margin for the rest of the year, if I heard you right. Yeah. The factors to have in mind when looking at the gross margin for the rest of the year is foreign exchange and commodity prices. They actually go in each of their direction. We have perhaps quite some headwind from silver prices during the last number of quarters. Roughly two points of headwind from silver and gold in Q1 and Q2. That will gradually disappear during the rest of the year. It being roughly 1 point of drag in Q3, and then being close to 0 drag in Q4 year-over-year. On the other hand, we've had some help from foreign exchange in the first part of the year. That will actually also then go down in Q3 and Q4, offsetting some of the easier comps on silver and gold prices. If you add that up net, you should expect to see a gross margin for the rest of the year that's flat to slightly up. When we get into next year, and as the hedging on silver prices expire, sort of come mid-next year, then we'll step-by-step see the upside from lower silver prices, if the silver price stays where it is currently. Very useful. Thank you very much. The next question will be from the line of Carina Lykke from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead. Your line will now be unmuted. Hi, there. Thank you very much for taking my question. I'd like to ask around the sales by category. I don't believe you've disclosed it in terms of, you know, sales by bracelets, charms, et cetera, since the second quarter of last year. Could you just give us some color around that in terms of how they're performing? Just as an extension, can you talk about the recurring element of sales in your business? For example, you know, someone buying a bracelet and then buying a charm going forward. Is that something you see as a potential support in if there's any potential macroeconomic uncertainty going forward? Thank you. I mean, first of all, the reason we are talking about the platforms is because that's kind of how we try to drive the business, just so kind of you get a sense. In the past, the company was very much focused on product, and we've switched that because that kind of is quite limiting the way you run your business. We do have these numbers here. Just see. If you look at the charms, this is quarter two this year versus prior year. Then you can see a growth of 9% on the charms. Bracelets is down by two points. Rings is kind of flat-ish. Earrings is up 7%. Necklaces and pendants is, yeah, it's plus 1%. There you go. The way we look at it is when you jump into the Moments platform, you'll eventually end up buying a bracelet with charms. Actually to look and evaluate the soundness of that business, you should look at it combined. What of course we are always very you know focused on is to make sure that we put more bracelets on people's wrists because that you know that's kind of the anchor for the Moments platform. These are the numbers so far that I just mentioned. Versus 2019, I think this was up double digits, the Moments platform. It's a very vital platform. Now our job is, because it's a discretionary purchase, it's really up to us to market and sell and explain and push every product actually inside our assortment. As I said, 75% of our business sits in the Moments platform, and it's very healthy. The frequency on charms, the only meaningful way to look at that is actually to draw out the line over like a two-year period. Otherwise it's not particularly meaningful. You can't read proper trends if you go down on an individual basis. There we haven't seen, from memory, the last piece I saw, we sell between five and seven charms per bracelet. You know what we call carriers. We have, we also have in our assortment, obviously, bracelets that don't, you can't wear charms and so you have to strip that out of the math and then look at the kind of charm-carrying bracelets because that kind of indicates the business model on Moments. That is very sound. On the short term, you know, I can just look at the number of charms that we're selling, which is growing healthy. One would assume that the business is doing well. I hope that explains it a bit. That's really clear. Thank you. As there are no further questions at this moment, I will now hand it back to the speakers for any closing remarks. Yeah. I mean, I think we've done a good session here. We're pleased with the quarter. We stay within the guidance. We found a new CMO. We're launching Diamonds by Pandora into the largest diamond market in the world. Business is solid. Phoenix is working really well. I think it's another quarter which we're very happy with. On that note, thank you for the attention. Thank you. Thank you.