In an interesting twist of politics, the Prime Minister of Finland, Alexander Stubb, told news reporters that Apple killed the nation’s top industry, resulting in an international credit downgrade announcement. Standard and Poor downgraded Finland’s sovereign debt rating to AA+ from AAA on Friday.

“..I guess one could say that the iPhone killed Nokia and the iPad killed the Finnish paper industry..”

To be fair, Prime Minister Strubb did not really pit the blame on Apple. His point was that the paper industry, which is the most important industry in Finland, has seen major downturns over the past few years as a result of the replacement of paper for digital products in many traditional categories. He refers to Nokia because that was a Finnish company and it’s also lost considerable market share, due in no small part to the popularity of the Apple iPhone.

Nokia is often called a “bellweather” for the Finn economy and the company has been in hard times in recent years. It’s been steadily losing market share to Apple and Samsung since its peak in the 1990s.

“Forest is coming back in terms of bio energy and other things. And actually a new Nokia is emerged in terms of (Nokia) Networks,” said the prime minister. “Usually what happens is that when you have dire times you get a lot of innovation and I think from the public sector our job is to create the platform for it.”