NIKE, Inc. NKE

Key data

What the plan pays for

Revenue on one side and margin on the other is an instruction to defend profit without letting the top line slide, and every lever that does both runs through mix and cost. Hill carries no soft bucket, while the four officers under him have 20% of their bonus on wage-related overhead and employee engagement. The equity changed in June 2025: after relative stock performance had been the sole long-term metric for four straight grants, the committee moved to sales and per-share profit and demoted the stock measure to a modifier.

What it has paid so far

The bars came down two years running. Fiscal 2026 asked for revenue half a point above the prior year and profit fifteen points below it, and the profit line cleared that lowered bar by $123M to pay 125%. The averaged scorecard read 101%, and the committee cut it to 74% so officers would not be paid above the rank and file. Hill did not hold the seat in fiscal 2024, when John Donahoe's team earned the 65%. Three straight long-term cycles have certified at zero, which is why the metric changed.

Both windows sit far enough below the index that the upside multiplier is gone and the negative-return cap binds.

What he does next

The fiscal 2027 margin bar is measured against a base a court handed him. A $986M benefit for tariffs ruled unauthorized landed in cost of sales in the fourth quarter, and NIKE has since collected it. Strip that out and the year's profit sits under the threshold that paid nothing in fiscal 2025. Thirty analysts model fiscal 2027 revenue of $45.6B and profit of $3.2B, a 7.1% margin, 121 basis points below the base he has to beat. There is no money to buy the difference: $2.9B from operations less $684M of capital spending leaves $2.2B against a $2.4B dividend, buybacks already fell to $146M from $3.0B, and $2.0B of debt has turned current. The plan also cancels out buyback variance, so shrinking the share count cannot lift the per-share bar.

So the levers are the cheap ones. Watch the channel split, $27.5B wholesale against $17.7B of NIKE Direct, because moving goods to wholesale takes store cost off NIKE's books and hands the customer back to the retailer. Watch Note 18: $385M of severance was booked in fiscal 2026 and the 10-K says more may follow, and because the plan removes unanticipated restructurings the charge costs him nothing while the savings stay. Watch Converse, down 31% to $1.2B, where the plan neutralizes divestitures, so a sale is worth nothing to his scorecard and might happen anyway.

Hill bought 40,048 shares for about $2.0M in two open-market purchases, December 2025 and April 2026, neither pre-scheduled, and sold nothing. Below him thirteen sales in twelve months came to $8.1M, of which Executive Chairman Mark Parker's block of 86,078 shares at $64.80 was $5.6M on a plan adopted in November 2024.

Closing thoughts

He is paid to stop the sales slide and lift the margin, and the only tools that reach both are mix and payroll. The one number that decides his next two years is the fiscal 2027 margin against 8.3%, a base a one-time tariff refund helped build, and the street sees him a full point short.