Nike is bracing for another round of job cuts after first-quarter sales fell and China revenue plunged for a ninth straight quarter, sending shares lower overnight.
The sportswear giant posted first-quarter revenue of $11.2 billion, down 4 percent from $11.7 billion a year earlier, and warned the sales slide will get worse in fiscal 2027.
Daily Mail reported that CEO Elliott Hill told employees the company’s restructuring “will result in fewer roles across Nike over time,” even as he said the company does not yet know how many jobs or which locations will be hit.
Shares fell as much as 10 percent in overnight trading and around 8.5 percent after hours as investors digested the numbers and the latest turnaround plan.
Greater China remains the clearest trouble spot. Revenue there plunged 26 percent to $1.18 billion in the quarter after stripping out currency effects, the ninth consecutive quarterly decline in a market that once powered Nike’s growth.
Hill said Nike Sportswear, the Jordan Brand, and Greater China all need work, and fixing them will take time. The company is changing how it sells in China and plans to strip online sales rights from some major retail partners starting in January.
Chinese rivals Anta and Li-Ning, along with Adidas, Puma, and fast-growing running brands On and Hoka, are pressing Nike hard. That competitive squeeze shows up in the results.
Direct-to-consumer sales through stores and the website fell 12 percent overall. Converse, the iconic brand Nike has owned since 2003, saw revenue plunge 28 percent to $263 million.
North America offered a rare bright spot with rising sales, but it was not enough to offset the broader decline. Net income fell 2 percent to $712 million, and earnings per share slipped to 48 cents from 49 cents.
Nike’s latest plan aims to simplify operations and save around $2.5 billion through fiscal 2031. The company expects roughly $1 billion in restructuring costs over that same stretch, mostly employee-related expenses.
About $300 million in severance costs already hit the books in fiscal 2026. Workers affected by the new changes will start getting notified in 2027.
Hill’s internal memo struck a careful note. “We don’t yet know the number of roles or the specific locations of positions,” he wrote, calling circulating head-count rumors speculative and saying he was “not taking it lightly.”
The company has already eliminated thousands of positions in earlier turnaround rounds. This round arrives as Nike continues to shrink its physical footprint, including moves such as Nike shuttering U.S. stores amid falling sales in recent restructuring waves.
Leadership is reorganizing the business into three geographic regions: the Americas; Asia Pacific and Greater China; and Europe, the Middle East and Africa. It also plans a new campus in Bengaluru, India, to tap talent and build capabilities.
Hill’s strategy leans on running products, stronger wholesale relationships, and new product pushes. Those are standard recovery levers after years of heavy direct-to-consumer bets and China expansion that no longer deliver.
The same sales pressure has already forced hard store decisions. Nike previously moved to shut down all 15 of its Live neighborhood stores across a dozen states when the small-format experiment failed to reverse the slide.
Retail pain is not limited to one brand. Other chains have made similar cuts, including cases such as Nordstrom closing an anchor store and laying off workers as shopping patterns shift.
Nike’s own earlier wave of store closures in a single month underscored how quickly the company is pulling back from underperforming locations while it reworks the operating model.
The China reset, cutting some partners’ online rights while the market posts a ninth straight quarterly drop, is a late admission that the old playbook stopped working.
Exact job totals and sites remain unknown. Hill has not committed to a number, and notifications do not begin until 2027. That leaves employees in limbo while the company books savings targets out to fiscal 2031 and already carries hundreds of millions in severance costs from the prior year.
The sequence is familiar in big corporate restructurings: ambitious growth bets, competition bites, costs get cut, and the workforce absorbs the hit years after the strategy is set. Nike’s China revenue freefall and the Converse collapse make the arithmetic plain even before the next round of pink slips.
Markets delivered their own verdict with the overnight share drop. Investors saw the guidance for a deeper fiscal 2027 revenue decline and priced in more pain ahead of any detailed head-count plan.
Nike still has scale, brand power, and a North America business that is growing. What it does not have is a quick fix for a China engine that has stalled for more than two years of quarterly declines, or for rivals that have taken share while the company reorganizes.
When global brands chase the next hot market and lose ground to leaner competitors, American workers and shareholders usually settle the bill, long after the strategy memos are written.