Five years ago they chose to sell straight to you — and skip the stores.
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✦ The bottom line
Nike bet big on selling shoes directly to you. The bet is now stalling.
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✦ Teach me
Money coming in
Every dollar a customer spends with a company. The most basic measure of how big a business is — not profit, since Nike still pays for the shoes, stores, staff.
Wall Street calls this
Revenue
You'll see this in every story. "Nike made $51B" means money in — not money kept.
The bet · last fiscal year
~$51
B
Money coming in for FY25. Nike Direct — selling straight to you — is what built the boom.
$51 billion a year is the size of the win — built over the last five years on the direct bet. But the question every investor asks about a winning company isn't "how big did it get?" It's "is the win still happening?" The annual number tells you the past. The most recent quarter tells you the present. So: what happened in the last three months?
But here's the catch · latest quarter
flat
↓3%
$11.3B in money in for the most recent three months. Basically flat. Strip out currency: down 3%.
Down 3% in one quarter could mean a few different things. It could mean the whole athletic-apparel category is having a rough patch — in which case Nike's just along for the ride. Or it could mean rivals are taking customers Nike used to keep — in which case this is Nike-specific. The difference matters enormously. The simplest way to tell? Look at the closest peer and see what they're doing.
How is the rest of the category doing?
Money in vs. one year ago — most recent reported quarter
Nike
−3%
Lululemon
+7.1%
Lululemon — Nike's closest US-listed direct peer — is still growing while Nike's slipping. The slowdown is Nike-specific, not the whole athletic-apparel category.