Contrary to popular belief, Apple has not singlehandedly killed Finland

In an interview with CNBC, Finnish prime minister Alexander Stubb jokingly said that Apple was responsible for killing off Finland’s two big economic “champions”: The once-mighty Nokia and its paper industry.

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“I guess one could say that the iPhone killed Nokia and the iPad killed the Finnish paper industry, but we’ll make a comeback,” Stubb explained. “Forest is coming back in terms of bio energy and other things. And actually a new Nokia is emerged in terms of (Nokia) Networks… 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.”

However, frequent BGR contributor Tero Kuittinen points out that Stubb’s comment, which came after his country’s credit rating was downgraded by Standard & Poor’s late last week, was clearly tongue-in-cheek and is being taken out of context by the American tech media who don’t understand that Stubb is actually a pretty big Apple fan. Kuittinen also points out that in past interviews Stubb has said that Finland itself was to blame for its current economic situation.

So while Apple’s powers are indeed great, it doesn’t seem that the company is yet capable of singlehandedly destroying other nations’ economies just yet.