Webdesk: Adidas’ CEO Bjrn Gulden has finally said that cutting ties with Kanye West’s Yeezy brand is “hurting” the business.
The boss said, “The loss of Yeezy is hurting us, of course,” especially in North America, where sales went down by 20%.
The clothing giant cut sales in the first quarter of 2023 after Yeezy lost €400 million.
A BBC News report showed that overall income had gone down by 1%.
After Ye went on an anti-Semitic rant in October, the shoe company cut ties with him.
“Adidas does not tolerate antisemitism or any other kind of hate speech,” the company said when it cut ties with the fashion mogul at the time.
Adidas also said that the piles of unsold Yeezy would cost the company an extra €500 million in profits by 2023.
Before, Adidas thought about the extreme option of setting West’s $500 million worth of unsold Yeezy shoes on fire if they lost a lot of money.
Several experts thought that the product’s mass was between $300 million and $500 million. According to Financial Times, this will cause the company to lose up to $1.3 billion in profits this year.
“What makes this so dramatic is how big it is,” Wedbush analyst Tom Nikic told the Washington Post, adding that the Yeezy brand made almost $2 billion a year in sales.
“That’s a really big and important part of (Adidas’s) business, and it happened all of a sudden.”
