Five years ago, a Nike earnings beat meant the stock went up the next morning. Not anymore. Nike has topped Wall Street's earnings estimate in each of its last four quarters, and the shares fell after two of those releases regardless. That gap between what the numbers say and what the stock does is exactly the kind of mispricing Winvesta Crisps exists to unpack, in plain language, before the rest of the market catches up. 60,000+ investors from all over India are already in. What about you?
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Most investors watching Nike this week think Thursday's earnings will settle whether Elliott Hill's turnaround is working. It will not, not by itself. Nike beat earnings estimates in each of its past four quarters and the stock fell after two of those prints anyway, sliding to a fresh 52-week low of around $35 in September 2026, down from just under $77 twelve months earlier. The number that will actually decide this week is smaller and less dramatic: whether North America wholesale, up 3 percent last quarter, can keep growing while Greater China revenue is still shrinking by double digits. That is the gap the stock is pricing, not the headline earnings-per-share figure.
👟 What Nike actually sells now
Nike does not run one business anymore. It runs a wholesale business that is recovering and a direct-to-consumer business that is still shrinking, and the mix between the two is the real story behind every headline number.
In the fiscal fourth quarter (ended 31 May 2026), wholesale revenue came in at $6.6 billion, up 4 percent on a reported basis and up 1 percent on a currency-neutral basis, per Nike's own earnings release. NIKE Direct, the stores-and-app business the company spent the past decade building up, brought in $4.1 billion, down 7 percent reported and down 9 percent currency-neutral, with digital sales down 12 percent and owned stores down 7 percent. Converse, the smallest piece, fell 32 percent to $244 million.
That split is not an accident. Under former chief executive John Donahoe, Nike leaned hard into direct-to-consumer, cutting back wholesale accounts and betting the app and Nike-owned stores could carry the brand alone. It did not work as planned: the retreat from wholesale left shelf space open for adidas, On and Hoka to fill, and Nike's own digital channel has now declined for several consecutive quarters. Elliott Hill, who took over as chief executive in October 2024 after three decades at the company, has spent his first two years reversing that call, rebuilding the wholesale relationships Nike walked away from and pushing product back onto the shelves at retailers such as JD Sports, DSG and Foot Locker.
Geographically, the picture is split just as sharply. North America, Nike's largest market, grew 3 percent in the fourth quarter to $4.8 billion. EMEA slipped 1 percent reported (6 percent currency-neutral) to $3.0 billion. APLA, the Asia Pacific and Latin America segment, was roughly flat. Greater China was the outlier in the wrong direction, down 12 percent reported and 17 percent currency-neutral to $1.3 billion, Nike's fourth straight quarter of double-digit declines there. China was once Nike's highest-margin market. It is now the one management cannot yet explain a path back from.