Nike Drops Out of the S&P 100 After Losing $230 Billion in Value

Nike is leaving the S&P 100 after a long slide that turned one of Wall Street's safest consumer stories into a turnaround stock. The index change is mechanical, but the message is not.

Nike is out of the S&P 100 before markets open on September 22, 2026, and that is not the kind of demotion you can explain away as index housekeeping. S&P Dow Jones Indices said on September 4 that SanDisk will replace Nike in the S&P 100, while Dell Technologies, Palo Alto Networks and Arista Networks will also join the index in a wider reshuffle. Nike stays in the S&P 500. It just no longer belongs among America's largest blue-chip names.

You don't get pushed out of that club because investors disliked one earnings call. Nike closed at $38.40 on September 4, near its lowest level in more than a decade, and data carried by MarketBeat and Charles Schwab show a market value of about $57 billion. At the end of 2021, Nike was worth well over $250 billion. However you slice the exact starting point, more than $200 billion of equity value has gone. That's not a wobble. That's a verdict.

The index change also corrects one common misunderstanding. SanDisk is taking Nike's specific S&P 100 slot, but the other incoming names are not all replacing Nike. S&P said Capital One Financial, BlackRock and Automatic Data Processing are also leaving the S&P 100 as part of the same September 22 rebalance. Nike is the headline because the fall is so visible. A sneaker company that once looked impossible to dislodge is being swapped out while software, cybersecurity, even data-center names move in.

Start with the business itself. Nike reported fiscal 2026 revenue of $46.3 billion, down 10% from the prior year, and net income of $3.2 billion, down 24%. Greater China revenue fell 13% for the year to $6.6 billion. That is a serious problem for a brand that spent years treating China as one of its most important growth engines. You can forgive one weak region for a quarter. You cannot ignore a market that keeps shrinking while local competitors get stronger.

China is not Nike's only headache. In running, the category Nike once owned by default, Hoka and On have built real positions with serious customers, not only weekend buyers looking for a comfortable shoe. Deckers, Hoka's parent company, reported Hoka sales of $2.2 billion in fiscal 2026, while On reported full-year 2025 net sales of 2.3 billion Swiss francs. Still smaller than Nike, of course. But that's the point: smaller brands do not need to beat Nike everywhere to hurt it, they only need to take the customers Nike used to assume were already spoken for.

The direct sales bet still has a bill attached

Nike has been trying to fix the damage from its own direct-to-consumer push. For years, the company pulled back from wholesale partners and tried to send more shoppers through Nike-owned stores and apps. The idea sounded tidy on a slide: more control, more data, better margins. The result was messier. Shelves that Nike had left behind gave rivals room to show up, and customers who wanted choice found plenty of it at retailers Nike had treated as less important.

Chief executive Elliott Hill has been unwinding some of that since returning to the company in October 2024. Nike has reopened parts of its wholesale network and cut inventory pressure - and put more emphasis back on sport and athletes, and on product pipelines. Good. It had to. But turnarounds in consumer brands are slower than spreadsheets make them look, because the customer has already moved by the time management admits the problem.

Retail Dive reported this summer that Nike is also changing how it sells online in China, with the company preparing to stop selling through at least some distributor-operated digital stores and bring more of that activity under Nike-controlled channels. That is a risky place to repeat the direct-sales experiment. China is not North America with different payment apps. Anta, Li-Ning and other local names have their own retail muscle, their own athlete rosters and a much sharper feel for the market.

Forced selling is not the real story

The S&P 100 removal will force funds that track the index, including products tied to the iShares S&P 100 ETF, to sell Nike and buy the incoming names. No fund manager has to hate the stock for that to happen. The rules do the work. If you're holding Nike, that mechanical selling matters in the short term, especially when the stock is already weak.

But don't mistake the index trade for the story. The market had already punished Nike before S&P made its announcement. The real issue is whether Nike can make people want the product again at the scale it once did, in China, in running - and in the wholesale channels it spent years weakening. A famous logo helps. It can't fix a broken strategy by itself.

Nike had an 18-year run in the S&P 100 after joining the index in December 2008. That period covered the company's rise into a global consumer giant and its slide into a much harder phase. Then came the fall. The next test is plain enough: whether Hill can rebuild growth before investors decide the old Nike premium is gone for good.

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