The bad news, at least financially, for Nokia continued today. Reuters reports that the second of the three major credit rating agencies, Standard & Poor"s, cut its rating of the smartphone maker down to "junk" status. This follows a similar downgrade by Fitch Ratings earlier this week.
In its statement, S&P said, "We still expect revenue from Lumia smartphones to grow over time, but not sufficiently to offset a rapid decline in revenue from Symbian-based smartphones over the next few quarters."
As they did with Fitch"s downgrade, Nokia sent out a press release with this statement about the S&P decision:
As we have detailed in recent announcements, Nokia is in the middle of a transformation program which encompasses every aspect of our business. We are implementing a decisive action plan to position our company for future growth and success. The main focus of these actions is on lowering the company"s costs, improving cash flow and maintaining a strong financial position, while bringing attractive new products to market.
Nokia also repeated that their financial situation "remains strong" with a net cash amount of 4.9 billion euros.
A new report from Strategy Analytics this week claims that Nokia is no longer the number one maker of mobile phones for the first time in over a decade as it lost that position to Samsung in the first quarter of 2012.