By Richa Naidu
LONDON (Reuters) -Many Nike stores throughout Russia were open on Friday afternoon, according to checks made by Reuters, more than a week after the world’s biggest sports retailer said it was temporarily closing down all its shops in the country.
At one of six Moscow stores Reuters reached by phone, an employee said: “We don’t have information yet, but I think the store will be open for at least, like, for a month.”
Nike said on March 3 that it would suspend operations at all its stores in Russia, joining several Western brands that did so in the wake of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. Nike has roughly 100 stores in the Russian Federation, according to the store directory on its website, which showed that all of them were “open”.
A Nike employee at the retailer’s corporate offices in Russia told Reuters that many of its stores remained open. The employee said, however, that “Nike Factory Stores” had been temporarily shut.
Beaverton, Oregon-based Nike said the stores that were open are owned and operated by independent partners, and that it will soon update its store locator online to reflect Nike’s closed owned and operated stores.
Days prior to its announcement that stores would temporarily close, Nike made merchandise purchases on its website and app unavailable in Russia and directed its customers in the country to brick-and-mortar stores instead. The company is offering continuity pay for its employees in closed stores.
(Reporting by Richa Naidu in London; Additional reporting by Arriana McLymore in New York; Editing by Vanessa O’Connell, Nick Zieminski and Will Dunham)