Adidas ends cooperation with Ye due to anti-Semitic remarks | Life/Entertainment

Adidas said it expects net profit to increase to 250 million euros ($246 million) this year from the decision to immediately stop production of its Yeezy product line and halt payments to E and his companies. Its shares fell more than 2% on Tuesday.

“Adidas does not tolerate anti-Semitism or any other form of hatred,” the company said in a statement on Tuesday. “Ye’s recent comments and actions were unacceptable, hateful and dangerous, and violate the company’s values ​​of diversity and inclusion, mutual respect and fairness.”

For weeks, Ye has made anti-Semitic comments in interviews and on social media, including tweeting earlier this month that he would soon go “deadly cheater 3 on the Jewish people,” an apparent reference to the US combat readiness scale. known as DEFCON. He was suspended from Twitter and Instagram.

Ye expressed some regret in an interview with podcaster Lex Friedman published online Monday, in which he described his initial tweet as a mistake and apologized to the “Jewish community.” An email message sent to a Ye representative was not immediately returned.

Adidas stuck with E through other controversies over his comments on slavery and the COVID-19 vaccine. But E’s anti-Semitic comments rocked the company’s own past ties to the Nazi regime, which the company was eager to put behind it. The World Jewish Congress noted that during World War II Adidas factories “produced materials and weapons for the Nazi regime using slave labor.”

Jewish groups said the decision to drop Ye was overdue.

“I would have liked an earlier clear position from a German company that was also linked to the Nazi regime,” said Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of German Jews, the main Jewish group in the country where Adidas is headquartered.

Adidas, whose CEO Casper Rorsted is stepping down next year, said it made the decision after conducting a “thorough review” of its partnership with Ye, whose talent agency CAA and fashion house Balenciaga have already dropped the rapper. A few hours before the announcement, some Adidas employees in the US spoke out on social media about the company’s inactivity.

Despite the growing controversy, Allen Adamson, co-founder of marketing consultancy Metaforce, said Adidas’ delay in responding was “understandable”.

“The positives are so significant in terms of the audience it appeals to — young, urban, fashion-forward, the size of the business,” Adamson said. “I’m sure they didn’t expect him to apologize and try to make it right.”

Adidas did not disclose Yeezy sales figures, but the impact will be more severe than expected, given that the brand has stopped production of all Yeezy products and stopped paying royalties, Morningstar analyst David Swartz said in a note published on Tuesday.

Swartz predicts Adidas’ total revenue this year will reach 23.2 billion euros ($23.1 billion), with the Yeezy brand bringing in 1.5 to 2 billion euros ($1.99 billion), or nearly 10% of the total amounts. Schwartz said the expensive brand accounts for up to 15% of the company’s net profit.

Adidas is estimated by Forbes to be worth $1.5 billion in net worth E and without the deal, it will drop to 400 million dollars, including his music catalog, real estate, cash and a stake in ex-wife Kim Kardashian’s Skims shapewear company. Forbes said it would no longer include E on its list of billionaires, even though the rapper has long insisted the magazine underestimated his wealth.

In recent years, Ye has alienated even her most ardent fans. Those close to him, such as Kardashian and her family, have stopped publicly defending him following the couple’s bitter divorce and his disturbing reports about her recent relationship with comedian Pete Davidson.

Carl Lamar, Billboard’s associate director of R&B/Hip Hop, said many of Ye’s fans were disappointed in him, but the destruction of his business was hard to watch for those who admired the rapper’s ability to reach new heights of success outside of hip-hop. .

“He’s someone who potentially laid the blueprint for a lot of future musicians,” Lamar said. “When you see someone reach their level of superstardom and go into business, into fashion, and touch things that billionaires, for our community, for hip-hop, for African-Americans, that’s very aspirational.

“But the same kids, even me, who were once super fans, you try to protect him, but every day he gives you a reason not to be,” Lamar added.

The 24-time Grammy Award-winning rapper has been steadily losing his radio audience, and even his airplay numbers have dipped slightly over the past month. Its airtime audience fell from 8 million for the week ended Sept. 22 to 5.4 million for the week ended Oct. 20, according to Luminate, an entertainment data and information company whose data includes Billboard’s music charts. the popularity of his songs when streaming on demand also fell during the same period from 97 million to 88.2 million, a drop of about 9%.

Since 2016, when Ye was hospitalized in Los Angeles for what his team called stress and exhaustion, Ye has developed a more controversial reputation. It was later revealed that he had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

He suggested that slavery was a choice and called the COVID-19 vaccine “the mark of the beast,” among other comments. Earlier this month during Paris Fashion Week, he was also criticized for wearing a ‘White Lives Matter’ t-shirt to a show and having models wear the same design. After getting banned from Twitter and Facebook, You offered to buy Parler, a conservative social network without a gatekeeper.

The worlds of fashion, music and clothing continued to distance themselves from E on Tuesday.

Foot Locker said it was ending its relationship with the Yeezy brand and pulling Yeezy shoes from its shelves and online sites. Gap said it will remove Yeezy Gap product from closed stores yeezygap.com. Universal Music Group, which owns the Def Jam label, said in a statement Tuesday that Ye’s music and merchandise contracts expired last year. MRC Studios announced Monday that it is delaying a full-length documentary about the rapper.

A spokesperson for Vogue confirmed on Tuesday that the magazine and its global editorial director, Anna Wintour, have no intention of working with E again following his recent controversial comments and behavior.

Jewish groups note the danger of the rapper’s comments at a time of rising anti-Semitism. Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, which on Tuesday applauded Adidas’ decision to drop Ye, said his organization has documented a tripling of harassment, vandalism and violence against Jews since 2015.

“Today, we operate in an environment where anti-Semitism is empirically on the rise,” Greenblatt said. “When people with big platforms give permission to anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry, it creates an environment where these activities have a degree of permission that they might not have had before.”

Lamar said he understands that Ye suffers from mental health and personal issues, but that only makes it more important to pause and reconsider, giving him a platform for his offensive comments.

“We’re looking at someone who was a beloved superhero in the African-American community,” he said. – But this is the one who falls on his own sword.”

Associated Press writers Christine M. Hall in Nashville, Leanne Itali in New York, Ryan Pearson and Anthony McCartney in Los Angeles and Peter Smith in Pittsburgh contributed to this report.