NIKE, Inc. (NYSE:NKE) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Matthew Friend: Sure, Aneesha. I mentioned earlier in response to Omar’s question, the monthly trends in China, but I’ll just hit it again quickly. With the door closures and retail traffic under pressure and the shift of COVID policy in December, our business was down high single digits. We flipped to growth year-over-year in the month of January and saw an improvement in brick-and-mortar traffic in China. And then in the month of February, we saw an even greater improvement relative to January. And that includes lapping the Lunar New Year period in the prior year because it was in a different month. So we are encouraged. I mentioned that our inventory levels are healthy there. And so we’re encouraged based on the momentum that we had as we exited the quarter.

As it relates to our full year revenue guidance. We revised our full year revenue guidance again upward, and that was based on strong momentum this month — this quarter. But also when I look at Q4 in particular, our fourth quarter outlook at this point in time is higher than it has been in the previous two quarters. So we’re continuing to see our brand momentum and our confidence continue to build. The largest driver of our Q4 revenue guidance is six months ago, we made the decision to cut our spring and summer buys to help ensure that we finish this fiscal year in a healthy place from an inventory perspective that we and our partners finish this year in a healthy place from an inventory perspective. And we’re making great progress against that.

So we expect to continue to see improvement in Q4 in our inventory and are confident that we’re going to finish this year in a position of strength as we look ahead to fiscal year ’24.

Operator: We’ll take our next question from Kate Fitzsimons, Wells Fargo.

Kate Fitzsimons: Curious if you can just expand on some of the movement we’ve seen in digital margins over the last couple of quarters. Sounds like you continue to see benefits associated with reduced digital shipments. It seems like you’re pleased with some of the movement on the ROAS front. So I’m curious now if you can just kind of speak to more detail about the margin delta maybe you’re seeing between the wholesale and direct channels. And just how should we think about the digital margin flow through at this point?

Matthew Friend: Sure. Well, we’ve been talking for some time about the — how our consumer-led digital transformation is transforming NIKE’s financial model. And you really see it both in terms of revenue and in gross margin. And if you look at the momentum that we’ve been driving from a top line perspective, I would say that we’ve benefited from roughly 3 points of benefit related to a higher mix of business going through our digital and our direct channels. And you can see that not only in the algorithm that we provided around high single digit to low double-digit growth, but just looking at our ASP performance and the continued momentum that we’re seeing as digital goes from being about 9% of our business in fiscal year ’19 to exiting this quarter at 27% of our mix of business.

We’ve always said that the margin contribution from our digital business is higher than the wholesale channels. And that had fueled gross margin expansion from fiscal year ’19 to fiscal year ’22. And as we look at some of the dynamics that I referenced on the call this quarter, what I was really trying to highlight is that not only is the channel mix a tailwind for us as we grow our digital business, but we actually think there’s opportunities for us to improve the profitability of the digital channel. And those two examples that I gave this quarter really were intended to reflect that. One, we talked specifically in EMEA about some of the efforts that the team is making to lower our fulfillment cost from a digital perspective through O2O, through reducing split shipments and adding pickup points.