Nike withdraws guidance, postpones investor day as it gears up for CEO change

Nike on Tuesday said it was withdrawing its full-year guidance and postponing its investor day as it gears up for a new CEO to take the helm.

Last month, the company announced that CEO John Donahoe would be stepping down in October and replaced with longtime company veteran Elliott Hill, effective Oct. 14. Given the impending CEO change, the company has decided to withdraw its full-year guidance and intends to provide quarterly guidance for the balance of the year, executives said.

"This provides Elliot with the flexibility to reconnect with our employees and teams, evaluate the current strategies and business trends and develop our plans to best position the business for fiscal '26 and beyond," finance chief Matthew Friend said on an earnings call with analysts.

When reporting fiscal fourth-quarter results in June, Nike cut its guidance for fiscal 2025 and said it was expecting sales to be down mid-single digits after it previously expected them to grow. Friend said since the fiscal year started, the company's "revenue expectations have moderated... given traffic trends on Nike Digital, retail sales trends across the marketplace and final order books for spring."

"We continue to see indications of slight second-half improvement in revenue trends versus our first half," said Friend. "As we plan to introduce and scale newness and innovation across the marketplace, we now expect gross margins to decline versus the prior year."

Nike said it expects revenue in its current quarter to be down between 8% and 10% and gross margin to be down about 1.5 percentage points. That's worse than the 6.9% drop in revenue that LSEG analysts had expected.

It's also postponing its investor day, originally scheduled for November. It's unclear when