Apple may be one of the world’s largest companies, but it’s always had its fair share of detractors. We would never have guessed that the Prime Minister of Finland was one, though.
Alexander Stubb said on Monday that, “We have two champions which went down. A little bit paradoxically I guess one could say that the iPhone killed Nokia and the iPad killed the Finnish paper industry, but we’ll make a comeback.”
At least he’s positive about the whole thing.
As you’re probably well aware, Nokia was far and away the world’s biggest mobile phone manufacturer for a number of years. Unfortunately, it couldn’t carry that dominance and popularity into the smartphone era and Apple, along with the rise of Google’s Android platform, has driven the company to the brink of obscurity. It was purchased by Microsoft earlier this year, who announced recently that it would soon be dropping Nokia branding all together.
If we’re being picky we’d perhaps suggest that it was Nokia’s enormous failure to adapt and complacency in capitalising on its lucrative market position which killed it and not Apple, but we don’t want to kick up a fuss. And the less said about the iPad replacing paper the better.
Stubb was speaking in the wake of the announcement from ratings agency Standard & Poor’s, declaring that Finland had had its Sovereign Debt Rating downgraded from AAA to AA+. The firm cited weak development, exposure to sanctions-hit Russia and said it could experience protracted stagnation due to its ageing population, shrinking workforce and weakening external demand.
