"High-Single Digits": Nike Just Issued Its Bleakest Forecast in Years — and Wall Street Is Running for the Exit

In 60 seconds: Nike just forecast that its revenue will fall by high-single digits this fiscal year — far worse than expected — reported its second straight profit decline, and announced more job cuts plus a full shake-up of its global business. Its shares crashed after the announcement as Wall Street lost patience with the turnaround.

What happened

On Thursday, Nike reported quarterly results that disappointed just about everyone watching. Revenue for the quarter ending August 31 — the first quarter of its fiscal 2027 — fell 4% to $11.2 billion, missing the $11.32 billion analysts expected, according to LSEG data. Profit dropped 2% to $712 million. And then came the real hammer: Nike said it now expects full-year revenue to decline by "high-single digits," a sharp downgrade from its earlier forecast of a low-to-mid-single-digit decline in the first half of the year.

Investors wasted no time. Shares fell as much as 8.5% in extended trading after the announcement, wiping roughly $2.5 billion off the company's market value in a matter of hours. The sell-off was swift enough to become one of the day's most-talked-about market stories.

Latest verified facts

The regional breakdown tells the real story. Every region except North America shrank: North America grew 2%, but Greater China — the market Nike has been trying to fix for years — collapsed. Revenue there fell 22% to $1.2 billion, a 26% drop on a constant-currency basis. It was the weakest spot on the map by a mile.

CEO Elliott Hill, who rejoined the company as chief executive in October 2024 to lead a turnaround, told analysts that Nike's turnaround is running into deeper trouble than expected. The company has been trying to revive growth by refocusing on key sports like running and rebuilding relationships with wholesale retailers after an ill-advised pivot to direct sales. But Hill acknowledged the fix is taking longer — and needs to go further — than planned.

So Nike is deepening its restructuring. The company will cut an undetermined number of jobs — it says it doesn't yet know how many roles are affected — and begin notifying employees in calendar 2027. It is collapsing its four global operating regions into three: the Americas, Asia Pacific and Greater China, and EMEA. And in a striking move, it announced plans to open a new campus in India, citing "strong capabilities and access to talent" there. The program is expected to deliver about $2.5 billion in savings through fiscal 2031.

One number did improve: gross margin rose 60 basis points to 42.8%, helped by lower warehousing and logistics costs. But nobody was celebrating that.

Why it matters

This isn't a blip — it's the second leg of a restructuring that already included job cuts, and it tells you how badly the world's biggest sportswear brand has misread its own market. Analysts point to a failure to release enough new, compelling products, leading to an uptick in promotions and discounts that erode the brand's premium aura. Hill himself flagged the Jordan brand and Nike sportswear as weak spots: "Our Nike performance business is not yet large enough to offset the pressure we're seeing in Nike sportswear, Jordan brand, and Greater China," he said on the post-earnings call. Reviving those weak areas, he warned, "will take time."

The China collapse deserves its own spotlight. Greater China was once Nike's growth engine; a 26% constant-currency decline is the kind of number that rattles an entire strategy, not just a quarter. And the decision to build a new campus in India while cutting jobs elsewhere is a quiet admission of where the company sees its future talent — and where it no longer does.

"We're building Nike for the long term," Hill said during the call, touting the company's relationship with women's basketball star Caitlin Clark as one bright spot. But investors are clearly running out of patience for the long term: in September, S&P Dow Jones Indices removed Nike from the S&P 100 — the blue-chip index — for the first time in 18 years.

Impact on the USA and the world

Nike employs tens of thousands in the United States, and job cuts — even ones that won't begin until 2027 — send a chill through the consumer sector. The miss also lands on a day when American retailers were already grappling with cautious consumer spending amid stubborn inflation. Nike's troubles, analysts say, are partly self-inflicted — strategic missteps and stale products — but the cautious consumer is the backdrop that makes those mistakes expensive.

Globally, the China numbers are the bigger signal. When a brand as entrenched as Nike loses a quarter of its Chinese sales, it tells you something about the competitive landscape there: domestic brands are taking ground, and American labels can't coast on legacy anymore. The India campus announcement is the flip side — a bet that the next decade of Nike talent comes from a different continent.

What happens next

The forecast is the thing to watch now. If Nike's high-single-digit decline materializes, fiscal 2027 becomes one of the worst years in the company's modern history — and the $2.5 billion savings program becomes the yardstick by which the next two years are judged. Watch the headcount announcements in early 2027 for how deep the cuts actually go; Hill promised "transparency" to employees, and vague cuts are what markets hate most.

The harder question is whether any of this fixes the product problem. Restructuring regions and campuses is logistics. Nike's real issue — a pipeline of products people actually crave — is harder to engineer. The Jordan retro launches are being deliberately scaled back, which means the company is betting it can replace one of its biggest cash cows with genuinely new hits. If that bet fails, the next earnings call will be uglier than this one. And if Greater China keeps falling at this pace, Nike's map of the future gets redrawn entirely.