Apple Screwed The Entire Finland Economy Claims Finnish Prime Minister
And to be fair to him there’s a certain amount of evidence that Apple did indeed screw over important parts of the Finnish economy. The invention of the smartphone did screw over Nokia and that paperless computing environment is at least partially here which doesn’t help Finland’s paper making industry all that much:
The prime minister of Finland has blamed Apple for the economic downturn his country is experiencing which saw it lose its AAA credit rating on Friday.
Alexander Stubb said the remarkable success of the California-based tech giant has had a negative impact on his country’s two biggest industries – technology and paper.
‘We have two champions which went down,’ Stubb told CNBC on Monday.
Not only has handset manufacturer Nokia suffered due to the success of smartphones such as the iPhone, but Finland’s paper industry has also fallen on hard times.
The country is a key production site for Europe’s biggest paper producers, UPM-Kymmene and Stora Enso, but Stubb said the success of tablet devices like the iPad had hit the sector hard.
‘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 predicted.
That’s always the problem with any new technology, there’s people happily making a mint out of the older technologies being replaced and they get screwed. There weren’t all that many buggy ship makers left after the success of the Model T Ford either.
However, I’m not entirely sure that the iPad killing the paper industry is all that important. Years back, Alan Coren, when editor of Punch, told of how he’d gone to Finland to meet their paper suppliers. And he’d pointed to some trees and asked if they were for the paper they printed Punch upon. The Finns all fell about laughing and said no, no, these trees were far more valuable than that, these trees were to be made into toilet paper.
So if loo paper is more valuable than printing paper then why’s the Finnish paper industry having problems? Surely no ones wiping their arse on their iPads are they?
Posted: 15th, October 2014 | In: Money Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
