Alexander Stubb
Alexander Stubb

Apple’s amazing innovations over the years have caused some of the biggest names in technology to take a back seat, everyone from Dell to Microsoft.

But who knew that the Cupertino-based giant caused entire nations to stumble.

Speaking on CNBC this week, Finnish Prime Minister Alexander Stubb called out Apple specifically for sparking the demise of the country’s paper industry as well as national treasure Nokia, the telecommunications giant that was purchased by Microsoft earlier this year for $7 billion.

Citing Nokia and the paper industry, Stubb said that “two champions” 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,” he said.

What abut Microsoft? After all, it promptly announced that it was cutting 12,500 workers at Nokia’s devices and services business in July, a big blow for Finland. At the time, Stubb called the layoffs “extremely regrettable.”

Meanwhile, tech news site Quartz takes issue with Stubb’s comments, noting that Nokia is the one to blame.

It’s true that Apple’s iPhone—released in 2007—redefined the smartphone, which had been pioneered years before by Nokia, Palm, BlackBerry, and others. But Apple didn’t kill Nokia. The Finnish company had many years to reinvent itself, and simply never did.

Meanwhile, here is Stubb’s interview from CNBC.

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