Athletic foot ware and accessories giant Nike Inc. (NKE) will be reporting its fiscal third quarter results tomorrow after the market closes.

Going into tomorrow's earnings report, analysts are expecting the company to report $0.88 per share, down 11.1% from the same period last year.

The economic downturn hit the company's sales, but last quarter it stated that it was starting to see a turnaround in sales and consumer sentiment. Wall Street will be looking for further signs that sales are starting to improve for company.

German sporting goods manufacturer Adidas AG (FRA:ADS) posted a whopping 52% jump in revenue for FY 2006 to $13.23 billion (over 10 billion euros), the first time Adidas has broken the 10 billion euro threshhold. The increase was fueled mainly as a result of tremendous sports clothing sales for the 2006 World Cup played on its home country turf and by the acquisition of sport shoemaker Reebok. 4Q earnings topped $17 million versus $4 million in losses in 4Q 2005. 4Q sales were up 48% to just under $3 billion. FY 2006 earnings were $649.76 million.

Adidas has ambitious plans for Reebok, the official sponsor for the National Football League. Reebok has lost market share in recent quarters, posting weak sales and small profit margins.The order backlog at Adidas fell 4% in 2006, and a much larger 18% for Reebok, meaning that production has consistently outstripped demand. Adidas bought Reebok in order to compete more effectively against Nike and Puma in the American market.

Adidas executives continue to be optimistic, forecasting 2007 sales to increase modestly, gross margins to increase 45-47%, and net income growing at 15%.

Yahoo Inc won big time when it bid to host and jointly operate the official site of 2006 FIFA World Cup. The official site far beat any other World Cup site such as ones offered by Microsoft (MSFT), AOL (Time Warner - TWX) or BBC, reporting at least three times as many visitors.

Up until the U.S. team's loss to Ghana and exit from the tournament, more than 1 million Americans visited Yahoo's World Cup site, while MSN and AOL averaged 300,000 and 100,00 daily visitors respectively. On the global front, 4 million visitors reached the site daily (data for June12-25), with the BBC and MSN both averaging 600,000 daily visits while AOL averaged 170,000 visits daily.

Yahoo also hosted the 2002 FIFA World Cup, but back then it charged $10 to watch video highlights. This year, video highlights lasting two minutes long were offered for free and 70 million consumers worldwide watched them. Another innovative addition was getting scores on cell phones, which was also a very popular service.

As revenues for Yahoo! come mostly in the form of ads, Yahoo also came up with a new advertising strategy, offering advertisers specific areas to sponsor, such as MasterCard sponsoring links for consumers to buy tickets. Yahoo also attracted more advertisers this tournament compared to the last one according to a Yahoo spokesman.

Yahoo shares were up 46 cents (1.5%) today to close at $31.06.

A Deutsche Bank analyst reiterated his buy rating today.  He called the current $30 level Yahoo is trading at, a "bottoming out" and wrote that he thinks Yahoo "should trade at least in line with the Internet media group."  In addition, it seems to him that Yahoo's paid search platform would be on track for an August launch.

As statistics come in, Yahoo probably made a good move hosting the World Cup's official Web site.  The site, which offers highlight videos and up-to-the minute scores and statistics, is averaging 5 million unique visitors per day.

A big news item today comes from Microsoft as a key Microsoft executive resigns.  The executive, Martin Taylor, was responsible for competitive strategy specifically against Google and Yahoo to win over users to Microsoft Live. Could this mean Yahoo is poised to gain from this personnel change?

Finally, and on a lighter note, Nelly (not to be confused with Melly!) Furtado asks on Yahoo! Canada Answers: What's the most beautiful sounding instrument in the world?