Nokia Oyj, the world’s biggest maker of mobile phones, had its debt rating cut for the first time by Standard & Poor’s, which cited market share losses and “weaker” operating margins at the Finnish company.
The long-term rating was lowered one step to “A-” with a stable outlook, S&P said in a statement Wednesday. S&P has since June 1998 ranked the debt “A,” the sixth-highest of 10 investment grades. Moody’s Investors Service has an equivalent “A2” rating. Nokia had about 5.3 billion euros ($7.5 billion) in long-term debt at the end of last year.
“The downgrade reflects the revision of our business risk profile assessment on Nokia to ‘satisfactory’ from ‘strong,’” S&P analysts Matthias Raab and Patrice Cochelin wrote in Wednesday’s report.
