Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Nokia (NOK) Downgraded by S&P to "A-"

Standard & Poor's lowered its debt rating on Nokia (NYSE:NOK) for the first time in its history, citing the loss of market share during Nokia's transition to Microsoft's (NASDAQ:MSFT) Windows Phone 7 platform.

"The downgrade reflects the revision of our business risk profile assessment on Nokia to ‘satisfactory’ from ‘strong,’ primarily because we expect that Nokia’s smartphone portfolio will make further significant market share losses during 2011 and 2012 until it has completed its adoption of Microsoft’s Windows Phone software as its new primary software platform for smartphones," S&P said.

S&P cut its rating on Nokia to "A-" while including a Stable outlook on them. Nokia has been rated "A" for the last 13 years.

As of the end of 2010, Nokia had about $7.5 billion in long-term debt it held.

Nokia was trading at $8.62, falling $0.06, or 0.69 percent, as of 12:04 PM EDT.

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