...NEW YORK (S&P Global Ratings) Dec. 14, 2016--S&P Global Ratings said today that it has reviewed several of its corporate issue-level and recovery ratings in the U.S. technology hardware sector. We had labeled these issue ratings as "under criteria observation" (UCO) after we published our revised recovery ratings criteria on Dec. 7, 2016. With our review complete, we removed the UCO designation from these issue-level ratings, raised nine, and lowered three (see list). Except for two of the downgrades, these actions resulted from a revision to the recovery rating on the debt instrument. We lowered two of the issue-level ratings even though the recovery ratings remained unchanged because we now cap issue-level ratings at '###-' when the issuer is rated '##' or '##+', regardless of the recovery rating. This change deemphasizes the weight recovery plays in up-notching issue ratings for issuers near the investment-grade threshold. This is because recovery is a smaller component of credit risk...
