Colin Browne
Interim President and Chief Executive Officer at Under Armour
Thank you, Kevin, and good morning, everyone. It's been a great privilege to lead Under Armour during this transition and work more closely with our amazing teammates across the globe. I look forward to partnering with Stephanie when she joins on February 27, continuing to advance our strategy as I resumed my role as Chief Operating Officer.
Having had the opportunity to spend some time with her, I know she is an incredible leader who will bring a breadth of pressure to our business with a keen focus on consumer centricity and digitalization as we continue driving our strategy forward. In the meantime, as Kevin mentioned, we are not standing still. Our purpose of empowering those who strive for more is eternal. Our strategic evolution in creating the space necessary to broaden our product aperture, refining our target consumer to the 16- to 20-year-old varsity athlete and more effectively segmenting our product, remains our immediate priorities.
To touch on these, I'd start by underscoring that is one of only a handful of authentic performance brands worn by athletes at all levels of competition, we've earned our reputation as a trusted brand for sports. The go-to apparel, footwear and equipment that athletes never knew they needed and once they have them, can't imagine living without. In this respect, we're doing a great job of fulfilling the train, compete and recover moments of an athlete's day. That leaves the nonactive or what we call live moments of their journey, which is a significant long-term growth opportunity that triples the total addressable market for Under Armour.
So how does this translate to a broader sports style offering, where the train compete and recover stages of an athlete's journey, our performance with style product, the live stage will be style with performance products, science rationale or operating science, consumers will ultimately decide. It's our job to give them more choices and therefore, more versatility to suit whatever part that they're outfitting.
Soft launched in October, this type of versatility is embodied in sub-speed, our unique training footwear engineered with a convertible heel to switch between active and recovery modes. From early reads, SlipSpeed's strong DNA, also sees it slotted into the space in between moments of style and self-expression. As SlipSpeed launches globally on February 14, we're excited to bring this innovation to a much broader audience and learn even more about the possibilities of this hybrid platform. To support this, we're opening a physical manifestation of our brand positioning with a pop-up store in the Flatiron District in Manhattan, which will showcase SlipSpeed and our newest apparel offering and a new format with less product density and enhanced storytelling.
Of course, none of this happens overnight. Still, you will see immediate progress and points on the board as we're reimagining some of our Spring/Summer '23 floor sets with enhanced merchandising and story telling to showcase how Under Armour can be worn away from training and competition.
In apparel, we've got the new structured wovens coming and introducing more variation of our unstoppable men's and women's bottoms to hit broader wearing occasions. We're also leveraging our leadership in performance tees and in the latest sports front. And with programs like our new women's Meridian bottoms, which have significantly improved anti-pilling component, it's the only legging you'll ever need for style performance incumbents.
In footwear, the near-term pipeline includes putting a younger spin on Phantom 1, Gemini and Forge. And this fall, you'll see even more sports side launches, including dynamic outfitting, new silhouettes and new colorways and maybe even a footwear collaboration or to. Transition to our second strategic refinement, we're also evolving our marketing and omnichannel strategies to better connect with the 16- to 20-year old varsity athletes, with an always-on social media activation approach, including a greater focus on unique content to amplify brand identity and drive cultural relevance.
We're seeing early improvements in brand metrics with this demographic in the U.S. and key international markets like Mexico and China. All this feeds into our ability to drive excellence into our omnichannel presence, particularly in e-commerce, where we also started to see the early benefits of recent investments. So overall, encouraging, and we look forward to leaning in and applying even more in the coming seasons.
The third is the ongoing evolution of our segmentation strategy and better balancing of the top most parts of our product pyramid. Consumers tell us that varsity athletes tend to buy more frequently at fuller and higher price points than other groups throughout the year. In this work, we're doing category by -- going category by category, addressing what premium looks like at every price point, determining opportunities to drive additional better and best level product assortments and what the marriage of innovation and style should look like as if we're designing unencumbered.
As we continue to sharpen and hone this strategy, we'll also heighten our storytelling to drive a more pronounced premium elements on athletes. And speaking of driving greater influence, our incredible roster of athletes continue to inspire a soul from Sharon Lokedi winning her debut at the New York City Marathon to Julio Rodriguez winning the MLB American League Rookie of the Year award to Justin Jefferson, breaking the Minnesota Vikings franchise, single season receiving record and Jordan Spieth, winning the match alongside Justin Thomas.
Under Armour continues to stand out, delivering performance and helping to empower athletes at the highest level with sport. And with 2023 in its early days, there's more in store for UA as we look forward to the second half of the NBA season for Stephen Curry and Joel Embiid. And in partnership with Dany Garcia and Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson, we launched as the official uniform supplier of the XFL's inaugural season on February 18.
So UA's brand momentum remains strong. So back to our third quarter performance. We delivered a solid quarter with revenue up 3% to $1.6 billion or up 7% on a currency neutral basis. Clicking down into the results by region, North America declined by 2%, coming in at just over $1 billion for the quarter with wholesale down 6% and 1% growth in DTC, driven by strength in our e-commerce business, partially offset by recovery retail stores.
Though we continue to see solid demand in our largest region, we were more promotional during the quarter to manage inventory against this challenging retail backdrop. Despite the dynamic retail environment, we continue to focus on elevating the consumer experience across channels while driving operational excellence.
EMEA was a standout again for us this quarter, with revenue up 32% to $265 million or 46% on a currency-neutral basis. This growth was driven by a solid sell-through across wholesale and DTC along with earlier than planned shipments. We are encouraged by our momentum in EMEA and intend to remain nimble given the continued marketplace uncertainty and building inventories.
APAC revenue was down 9% to $198 million or up 1% on a currency-neutral basis despite ongoing COVID challenges impacting retail traffic and store availability. Particularly in China, we grew our wholesale business during the quarter. In addition, outside of China, we saw positive momentum in our e-commerce business. And finally, our Latin American business was up 45% to $64 million in the quarter or up 41% on a currency-neutral basis.
Turning to operations, we continue to see improvements across our supply chain with our factory partners making progress in returning to pre-pandemic production efficiency. And ocean and delivery times continue to improve, which contributed to significant tailwinds from less air and ocean freight during the third quarter, a trend we expect to continue into our fourth quarter.
From an inventory perspective, levels continued to be elevated across our sector. At the end of the third quarter, our inventory was up 50% to $1.2 billion. As a reminder though, our inventory was quite lean in fiscal '21 due to our constrained strategy and supply chain disruptions. So a large part of this increase and the increase over the next few quarters is simply normalizing to levels to us being a close to a $6 billion brand.
At the end of fiscal '23, we expect a similar growth rate of about 50%. But again, to contextualize this, this growth rate is up an $800 million base from the prior year, which was similar to 2015 when we were the $4 billion business. We do expect our year-end inventory growth rate to be the peak followed by elevated yet appropriate step-downs in the following quarters. That said, we continue to feel confident about where we are relative to our plans and managing this aspect of our business. To this point, we expect inventory to stay around three turns as we work through this challenging environment.
In closing, as I transition back to the chief operating role, I want to say how proud I am to be part of Under Armour. It's been an honor and a privilege to lead this iconic brand. Over the last nine months, I have worked with our amazing global teammates and now have a much broader understanding of our business, which will help me support Stephanie as she steps into her role.
I'll now hand it over to Dave.
