Adidas has concluded its dispute with Kanye West over antisemitic remarks he made in 2022, which halted their “Yeezy” collaboration.
At the time, Adidas had discontinued the Yeezy line and began selling off remaining stock at wholesale prices.
However, on Tuesday, the company announced it had reached a settlement with West, bringing all legal proceedings between them to an end.
“There [aren’t] any more open issues and there is no… money going either way,” Adidas chief executive Bjorn Gulden said on a conference call.
“There were tensions on many issues [but]… both parties said we don’t need to fight any more,” Gulden said on the call about the firm’s latest financial results.
The drama with West “belongs to the past”, he added.
“When you have conflicts like this, you take provisions and you have legal opinions and there are negotiations and there are settlements being done, and this is the end to it.
“No-one owes anything to anybody anymore. Whatever was is history”, he said.
Ending the partnership has left Adidas with Yeezy stock worth around €1.2bn (£840m), with the sports brand selling product in batches and donating the proceeds to NGOs, including its own recently launched anti-discrimination foundation.
The final Yeezy stocks will be sold by the end of 2024, the company said.
The decision to move on from the “fight” marks a stark contrast to 2022. At the time, Adidas said it does “not tolerate antisemitism and any other sort of hate speech”.
It added: “Ye’s recent comments and actions have been unacceptable, hateful and dangerous, and they violate the company’s values of diversity and inclusion, mutual respect and fairness.”
Adidas and Kanye West launched their collaboration in 2014, creating the highly popular Yeezy brand.
Even after the controversy, demand for Yeezy products remained high, with many trainers fetching hundreds—and sometimes thousands—of pounds in resale markets.
In October 2022, West’s Instagram and X (formerly Twitter) accounts were suspended following a series of antisemitic remarks.
He repeated these views in several interviews and podcasts over the following months, some of which remained unaired.
By December, West appeared on Alex Jones’ InfoWars, where he controversially expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler.
The rapper, who has been open about his struggles with bipolar disorder, was diagnosed several years ago and has publicly discussed his mental health challenges.