NIKE'S TURNAROUND UNDER ELLIOTT HILL IS BEHIND SCHEDULE

Elliott Hill has run Nike as president and CEO since October 14, 2024, when the board removed John Donahoe and brought back a 32 year company veteran to fix a business that had drifted from its own playbook. Nike's own numbers, reported through the summer of 2026, say the fix is real but slow. Full year revenue for fiscal 2026 came in flat at 46.4 billion dollars, tariffs turned into a 1.5 billion dollar annualized cost that the Supreme Court then struck down, and Nike is still cutting distribution jobs while it waits for the sales growth Hill promised.

Elliott Hill Spent Three Decades At Nike Before The Board Called Him Back

Hill started at Nike as an intern in 1988 after working as an assistant athletic trainer for the Dallas Cowboys, and he spent 32 years inside the company before retiring in 2020, the same year Donahoe took over as CEO. Nike's board announced on September 19, 2024 that Donahoe was out and that Hill would return as president and CEO effective October 14, with Donahoe staying on as an advisor through January 31, 2025 to hand off the role. The company Hill inherited was a long way from the one Phil Knight built out of a waffle iron and a rubber mold in his garage. Its founding story is the version of Nike Hill has spent his tenure trying to get back to, five sports at a time.

Win Now Runs On Five Sports, Three Countries And Five Cities

Hill's plan, called Win Now internally, reorganizes Nike's staff around five fields, running, basketball, football, training and sportswear, instead of the men's, women's and kids' categories the company used before. The plan also names three priority countries, the United States, China and the United Kingdom, and five priority cities, New York, Los Angeles, London, Beijing and Shanghai, where Nike is concentrating stores and marketing spend. Teams inside Nike, Jordan and Converse now work by sport rather than by brand silo, a structure Hill has said is meant to get product built closer to how people actually play. Part of that bet showed up on Nike's own campus in Beaverton, where the Philip H. Knight campus was rebuilt into a design lab meant to move footwear from sketch to shelf faster than the sprawling structure Hill took over could manage. The basketball bet specifically sits on top of a deal Nike already had locked in: its NBA uniform contract runs through the 2037 season, a commitment that outlasts any turnaround timeline Hill has given investors.

46.4 Billion In Revenue, Flat On The Year Hill's Plan Had To Work

Nike's fiscal year ends every May 31, and the fiscal 2026 results, reported June 26, 2026, show revenue of 46.4 billion dollars for the full year, flat on a reported basis and down 2 percent once currency swings are removed. Diluted earnings per share fell 3 percent to 2.10 dollars from 2.16 dollars the year before. The fourth quarter alone brought in 11.0 billion dollars, down 1 percent reported and down 4 percent once currency is stripped out, with diluted earnings per share of 0.72 dollars that included a 0.52 dollar benefit tied to a tariff refund covered below. North America was the one region that grew; Greater China kept shrinking. Selling and administrative costs fell 2 percent, largely because Nike spent less on the kind of athlete endorsement deals that once drove its marketing budget. Nike's next report, first quarter fiscal 2027 earnings, is scheduled for October 1, 2026, and analysts have already said the real payoff of Hill's plan is more likely to show up in fiscal 2027 than it did in fiscal 2026.

Nike Raised Prices For A Tariff Bill The Supreme Court Then Erased

Nike told investors in June 2025 that tariffs would cost the company about 1 billion dollars and cut fiscal 2026 gross margin by 0.75 percentage points. By that fall the estimate had grown to 1.5 billion dollars in annualized costs and a 1.2 percentage point margin hit, after reciprocal tariff rates rose for several of the countries Nike sources from. About 16 percent of the footwear Nike imports into the United States comes from China, taxed at 30 percent at the time, and Nike said it would cut that share to the high single digits by the end of fiscal 2026 while raising prices to cover the rest. Then, on February 20, 2026, the Supreme Court ruled 6 to 3 that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act never gave the president authority to impose tariffs in the first place, striking down both the reciprocal tariffs and the separate tariffs tied to fentanyl enforcement on China, Canada and Mexico. Nike booked a 986 million dollar benefit in its fiscal 2026 fourth quarter for the expected recovery of tariffs it had already paid under the law the court threw out, money that shows up directly in the 0.52 dollars of that quarter's earnings per share.

Hill's Roster Changed As Fast As The Balance Sheet

Nike announced in late January 2026 that it would cut 775 jobs at its distribution centers in Tennessee and Mississippi, including 583 positions at two Memphis facilities, effective April 3, 2026, on top of roughly 1,000 corporate positions eliminated the previous summer. It was the company's third consecutive year of workforce reductions under the turnaround. The boardroom changed too. In September 2026, Alexandre Arnault traded a role at Tiffany for a seat on Nike's board, bringing an LVMH executive's eye to a company still rebuilding its lifestyle credibility. Not every relationship survived the rebuild. That same month, Kylian Mbappe left Nike for a design role at On, one of the highest profile athlete exits since Hill took over. Nike did keep Drake's Nocta label inside its own house rather than spin it off as an independent company, a reminder that the brands Nike owns outright are staying put even when the athletes wearing them do not.

Nike has already told investors where to look for the answer. Fiscal 2027, which started June 1, 2026, is the year the company says Win Now should show up in growth, not just in reorganized org charts and reshuffled boards, and October 1 is the first chance to check.