The shoe company Skechers is being acquired for more than $9 billion to be taken private by the investment firm by 3G Capital.
The deal comes amid growing uncertainty over how U.S. President Donald Trump's tariffs on foreign goods will affect companies who make their products overseas, particularly in China. Athletic shoe makers have invested heavily in production in Asia.
The offer of $63 per share represents a premium of 30% to Skechers’ 15-day volume-weighted average stock price. The deal was unanimously approved by Skechers' board.
Skechers shares jumped nearly 25% Monday, to $61.56.
In a press release announcing the deal, the companies did not mention the potential impacts of Trump’s tariffs on its business going forward. However, Skechers says that about two-thirds of its revenue comes from sales outside of the U.S. China accounts for 15% of the company’s revenue, according to the data firm FactSet.
The deal comes at a precarious time with Trump’s ongoing, on-again-off-again tariff announcements. Like many other companies increasingly have done since Trump’s widespread tariff announcements, Skechers did not issue guidance when it released its first quarter earnings in April. Chief Financial Officer John Vandemore told investors that the “current environment is simply too dynamic from which to plan results with a reasonable assurance of success.”
Executives also said they would be looking to minimize products going to the U.S. from “high-cost locations,” including the impact of tariffs. The company did not immediately provide a breakdown of foreign production, but many of their shoes come with a “Made in China” stamp.
Trump raised the tariff on Chinese imports to 125% in early April, hours after China boosted the duty on American goods to 84% in an escalating battle that threatens to disrupt trade between the world’s two largest economies.
Skechers executives said last month that the company had several “levers” it could pull to deal with tariffs, including cost sharing with vendors, sourcing optimization, and price adjustments.
“We’re looking at how we optimize the global cost of tariffs in all markets when we look to move production around,” Vandemore said last month. “Obviously, with an effective tariff rate at about 159%, products from China to the U.S. are prohibitively expensive.”
Skechers has about 5,300 retail stores worldwide, about 1,800 company-owned.
About 97% of the clothes and shoes purchased in the U.S. are imported, predominantly from Asia, according to the American Apparel & Footwear Association. Using factories overseas has kept labor costs down for U.S. companies, but neither they nor their overseas suppliers are likely to absorb price increases due to new tariffs.
When the deal closes, the company will be led by Skechers Chairman and CEO Robert Greenberg and his management team. Its headquarters will remain in Manhattan Beach, California, where it was founded more than three decades ago.
Skechers reported a record $9 billion in revenue in 2024 with net earnings of $640 million.
The deal with 3G Capital is expected to close in the third quarter this year.
FILE - A Skechers sign is shown in San Francisco, March 17, 2024. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu, file)
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department faces a Friday deadline to release its files on Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted sex offender and wealthy financier known for his connections to some of the world’s most influential people, including Donald Trump, who as president had tried to keep the files sealed.
The Justice Department hasn’t said when during the day it intends to make the records public. The total volume is also unclear, though Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a Fox News Channel interview that he expected the department to release “several hundred thousand” records Friday and then several hundred thousand more in the coming weeks.
The records could contain the most detailed look yet at nearly two decades worth of government investigations into Epstein’s sexual abuse of young women and underage girls.
Their release has long been demanded by a public hungry to learn whether any of Epstein’s rich and powerful associates knew about — or participated in — the abuse. Epstein’s accusers have also long sought answers about why federal authorities shut down their initial investigation into the allegations in 2008.
Bowing to political pressure from fellow Republicans, Trump on Nov. 19 signed a bill giving the Justice Department 30 days to release most of its files and communications related to Epstein, including information about the investigation into Epstein's death in a federal jail.
The law’s passage was a remarkable display of bipartisanship that overcame months of opposition from Trump and Republican leadership.
That law allows for redactions about the victims or ongoing investigations but makes clear no records shall be withheld or redacted due to “embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity.”
Attorney General Pam Bondi said on Nov. 14 that she had ordered a top federal prosecutor to investigate Epstein’s ties to Trump’s political foes, including former President Bill Clinton. Bondi acted after Trump pressed for such an inquiry, though he did not explain what supposed crimes he wanted the Justice Department to investigate. None of the men Trump mentioned in a social media post demanding the investigation has been accused of sexual misconduct by any of Epstein’s victims.
In July, Trump dismissed some of his own supporters as “weaklings” for falling for “the Jeffrey Epstein hoax.” But both Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., failed to prevent the legislation from coming to a vote.
Trump did a U-turn on the files once it became clear that congressional action was inevitable. He insisted that the Epstein matter had become a distraction to the Republican agenda and that releasing the records was the best way to move on.
Police in Palm Beach, Florida, began investigating Epstein in 2005 after the family of a 14-year-old girl reported she had been molested at his mansion. The FBI joined the investigation, and authorities gathered testimony from multiple underage girls who said they had been hired to give Epstein sexual massages.
Ultimately, though, prosecutors gave Epstein a deal that allowed him to avoid federal prosecution. He pleaded guilty to state prostitution charges involving someone under age 18 and was sentenced to 18 months in jail.
Epstein’s accusers then spent years in civil litigation trying to get that plea deal set aside. One of those women, Virginia Giuffre, accused Epstein of arranging for her to have sexual encounters, starting at age 17, with numerous other men, including billionaires, famous academics, U.S. politicians and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, then known as Britain’s Prince Andrew.
All of those men denied the allegations. Prosecutors never brought charges in connection with Giuffre’s claims, but her account fueled conspiracy theories about supposed government plots to protect the powerful. Giuffre died by suicide at her farm in Western Australia in April at age 41.
Federal prosecutors in New York brought new sex trafficking charges against Epstein in 2019, but he killed himself in jail a month after his arrest. Prosecutors then charged Epstein’s longtime confidant, British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, with recruiting underage girls for Epstein to abuse.
Maxwell was convicted in late 2021 and is serving a 20-year prison sentence, though she was moved from a low-security federal prison in Florida to a minimum-security prison camp in Texas after she was interviewed over the summer by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche. Her lawyers argued that she never should have been tried or convicted.
The Justice Department in July said it had not found any information that could support prosecuting anyone else.
After nearly two decades of court action and prying by reporters, a voluminous number of records related to Epstein is already public, including flight logs, address books, email correspondence, police reports, grand jury records, courtroom testimony and transcripts of depositions of his accusers, his staffers and others.
Yet the public’s appetite for more records has been insatiable, particularly for anything related to Epstein’s associations with famous people including Trump, Mountbatten-Windsor and Clinton.
Trump was friends with Epstein for years before the two had a falling-out. Neither he nor Clinton has ever been accused of wrongdoing in connection with Epstein, and the mere inclusion of someone’s name in files from the investigation does not imply otherwise.
Mountbatten-Windsor denied ever having sex with Giuffre, but King Charles III stripped him of his royal titles this year after Giuffre’s memoir was published after she died.
Sisak reported from New York.
Follow the AP’s coverage of Jeffrey Epstein at https://apnews.com/hub/jeffrey-epstein.
FILE - This photo provided by the New York State Sex Offender Registry shows Jeffrey Epstein, March 28, 2017. (New York State Sex Offender Registry via AP, File)
