Philip Knight Quotations

Nike's business is healthy in every area except one, ... We are enjoying strong results in all of our international regions, and in U.S. apparel and equipment; however, our U.S. footwear business continues to pose challenges.

He's bigger now, we're more prepared for it now,

Mark has a proven track record in driving creativity, innovation and growth. He's an experienced, talented executive and has played an instrumental role in building our business and making the Nike brand as strong as it is today.

Succession at any company is challenging, and unfortunately the expectations that Bill and I and others had when he joined the company a year ago didn't play out as we had hoped. I want to personally thank Bill for his dedication and commitment over the past year.

Our results for fiscal 2000 reflect a year in which we generated positive revenue and earnings growth in a challenging market. While the strength of the U.S. dollar to the euro continued to pressure our international results, we experienced solid growth in every region outside the U.S.

Our results were helped by lower-than-expected spending in the first quarter, ... While we expect that spending will reach more normal levels beginning in the second quarter of this year, we remain focused on effectively managing our cost structure going forward, as evidenced by the actions we announced today regarding our Asia-Pacific operations.

We continue to show strong growth in profitability despite significant pressure caused by the strength of the U.S. dollar against the euro. Our international business is robust, showing constant dollar revenue growth in every region outside the U.S.

We endured many significant challenges in the second quarter, in particular, a soft U.S. retail market for athletic footwear and apparel. Despite these challenges, we met our bottom line expectations as we began to see an impact from our efforts to control expenses in a weak retail environment.

I'd rather he retire than play without his normal enthusiasm and that was sort of the decision that he made,

The distance between the companies that Bill managed in the package goods business and Nike and the new athletic equipment business was too great for him to make that leap.