Nike's $1.1 Billion Quarter Isn't What It Looks Like

The headline number came from Washington, not Beaverton.

Nike’s future isn’t as bright as it seems... yet.

Nike reported fourth quarter and full year fiscal 2026 results yesterday, and if you only read the headline, you’d think Elliott Hill just turned the company around. Net income up 407 percent. That’s the number every story led with this week.

It’s also mostly not real.

Nike’s diluted earnings per share for the quarter came in at $0.72, but $0.52 of that was a one-time benefit tied to the expected recovery of tariffs, the ones the Supreme Court struck down earlier this year. Strip that out and you get $0.20 adjusted EPS, still a beat against the $0.13 Wall Street expected, but nowhere close to a 407 percent anything. Revenue actually declined 1 percent on a reported basis to $10.97 billion, down 4 percent currency-neutral. Wall Street knew this within minutes of the release, which is why the stock dropped as much as 8 percent in extended trading before clawing back most of that move once the call started and the actual quarter came into focus.

So if the tariff windfall isn’t the story, what is.

Buried a few paragraphs into the earnings materials is a number that matters more than the net income line. North America wholesale grew 10 percent in the quarter, and on the call, Matthew Friend confirmed that the Foot Locker relationship posted positive Nike revenue and retail sales comps for the first time in four years. Four years. That’s basically the entire Elliott Hill tenure spent repairing a wholesale relationship Nike itself broke under the DTC-first strategy of the prior regime, and it just crossed into positive territory the same quarter a tariff refund was stealing every headline.

That's the big Q4 story, and it's not the one anyone's writing about this morning. It's not the only number Nike buried either... wait until you see what they said about China.