What year did Nike go public?

Nike went public in 1980.

By that year, Nike had grown far beyond its origins as Blue Ribbon Sports, the Oregon company founded by Phil Knight and Bill Bowerman in 1964. The business initially imported Japanese running shoes and sold them at track meets, but it began developing its own Nike-branded footwear in the early 1970s. The company officially adopted the Nike name in 1971.

Nike reached about 50 percent of the U.S. athletic-shoe market by 1980 and went public in December of that year. Its initial public offering helped provide capital for continued expansion into new sports, international markets and larger product lines. The timing is sometimes confused with Nike’s 1971 rebranding or its 1980 founding of the Nike Sport Research Lab; those are separate milestones. Nike later became a major publicly traded corporation and joined the Dow Jones Industrial Average in 2013, replacing Alcoa.