4. NIKE, Inc. (NYSE:NKE)
Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 70
NIKE, Inc. (NYSE:NKE) makes and sells athletic products. The company has an impressive dividend history of 32 consecutive years of payouts to shareholders. The payout has grown consistently for the past nine years. On February 10, the firm declared a quarterly dividend of $0.305 per share, in line with previous. The forward yield was 0.84%.
NIKE, Inc. (NYSE:NKE) is one of the top sports stocks on Wall Street. Among the hedge funds being tracked by Insider Monkey, London-based investment firm Fundsmith LLP is a leading shareholder in NIKE, Inc. (NYSE:NKE), with 8.7 million shares worth more than $1.2 billion.
In its Q4 2020 investor letter, Dynamo Cougar, an asset management firm, highlighted a few stocks and NIKE, Inc. (NYSE:NKE) was one of them. Here is what the fund said:
“Nike used to have a very traditional IT infrastructure, which was the starting point for their transformation. Back in 2013 the company had most of their IT in one data center and two distinct IT and software development teams. The infrastructure was organized in a way that all IT solutions, such as Nike.com and Nike apps, were running on the same servers and databases. The result was that any change had to be approved and then deployed with the next release. It was a very manual process, depended on a number of different vendors, and had to be approved by a waterfall process involving both the software and the IT teams. As of 2018, the company has four AWS regions, 150 software engineers, three development locations, and multiple data center locations. In the process, the company decided that they would not just lift and shift their existing applications from their own servers to the public cloud, but instead decided to rethink every single component of their IT organization. The results show that this transformation worked. The organization went from one software deployment every two months to 2.6 deployments per day. Nike went from 90% manual software testing to 100% automated testing, which freed up a lot of developer time. They managed to reduce the time to make small changes on the website and apps from 3 hours to 5 seconds, which means they could react to sports and similar live events. In the past it took more than six months to add a new experience to their digital services, and today it takes one day. In the past they would have a 3-month lead time for new hardware and today they can scale and deploy without any lead time.5 The IT infrastructure now supports 50+ commerce countries versus 6 in 2012, supports 25 languages versus 7, and enables the e-commerce site to access the inventory of 500+ retail stores.
The early move to the cloud and the willingness to adapt to the new environment also allowed Nike to benefit from some significant learnings. For instance, the company first used the Cassandra database when they moved to the cloud. However, due to many technical limitations, it would not allow them to scale for peak demand. Peak demand was becoming a big problem because the Nike SNKRS App would launch products with very limited availability, which meant that millions of people would access the app at the same time. Nike then decided to move to the AWS DynamoDB database (a platform offering), which allowed them to scale up prior to these launches, and thereby spend 98% less than with Cassandra, while offering the same service. In addition, they managed to monitor the launches in real time, which allowed them to react to problems and error messages within seconds. The vast amount of data that is generated within this very short period is now analyzed with machine learning techniques to improve the stability, reliability, and optimization of future launches. The company is working on a number of other efforts that benefit from the cloud environment, such as the implementation of RFID whose data output is managed through the AWS IoT offering.
The benefits of this transformation to the consumer are clear. Nike can now deal with higher demand, deal with sudden spikes in orders, offer better product recommendations, offer more customization, provide better product fulfillment, and more. In addition, the company benefits from a leaner and more efficient IT organization, better product conversion, more feedback data from customers, social integration into products, and ultimately a more satisfied costumer. We think Nike’s continued investment into their modern IT stack will be a key differentiator for their competitive positioning.”
