Nike and International Labor PracticesNike has long been known as the only shoe brand you can wear. Since its inception in the early 1970s, teenagers have seen the brand's "swoosh" as a sign of cool. With their celebrity endorsements with people like Tiger Woods, kids wanted the shoes so they could be like their sports star. Nike was headed to the top rung of the sneaker industry until it ran into trouble in the 1990s with news leaking of labor violations at its overseas factories. Executive Summary Nike's business strategy is smart. One that founder Phil Knight thought of while still in school at Stanford. Instead of paying Americans to put together Nike shoes, Knight thought it would be a better idea to take manufacturing facilities overseas to places where labor is much cheaper than in the United States, places like Taiwan and Korea of the South. With 86% of its products manufactured in one of these two countries and Nike employing large numbers of people living there, the countries grew richer and richer until Knight decided that prices were too high to continue producing there (Hitting the Wall, 3) . He decided to move factories to places in China like Indonesia, where countries were practically begging for foreign investment. Production went well until the early 1990s, when strikes rose to 112 in 1991 and news began to leak out about the terrible conditions Nike's workforce was working in. The company used underage workers and underpaid them to the point that a family could no longer cope. They don't even survive on wages earned in a Nike factory. From this point, Nike's sales began to decline and they came back into the media spotlight numerous times in the 1990s for their poor labor practices. Porter's Five Forces: Rivalry What kept Nike ahead of its competitors was its strategy, which it still employs today. Instead of producing the shoes in the United States, Nike moved all of its factories overseas where cheaper labor could be used to produce the shoes. With the money saved in this way, Nike decided to direct it towards marketing to have big sports names like Michael Jordan to promote its products. In 2003 alone, Nike spent $153 million on advertising, more than four and a half times more than Adidas spent on advertising in the same year (The FN List). There are many popular brands of athletic shoes in the United States..