Article by Cambridge Judge lecturer and MBA alumnus Hamza Mudassir (MBA 2012) on how the world ran out of semiconductors was third most-read University of Cambridge article in The Conversation in 2021.
An article on “How the world ran out of semiconductors” written by Hamza Mudassir, Visiting Fellow in Strategy and alumnus at Cambridge Judge Business School, was the third most-read article from the University of Cambridge published last year in The Conversation, a publication in which academics write on timely topics.
The article explored how the “great semiconductor famine of 2021” is affecting industries ranging from computers to automobiles. While it’s easy to blame the COVID-19 pandemic, “the truth is that the global semiconductor supply chain had this coming for some time” owing to over-reliance on two companies, Taiwan Semiconductor and Samsung, and “astronomically high” barriers to entry for new manufacturers.
The article published on 5 March 2021 had 337,518 reads in 2021, about half of this in the US followed by India, the UK, Canada, Australia and Singapore. Articles in The Conversation can be republished by other publications, so the article on semiconductors was published by Fast Company (211,328 reads), Flipboard, UPI, Channel News Asia and several other outlets.
The top two reads in The Conversation last year from the University of Cambridge concerned the Omicron variant of coronavirus (492,309 reads) and vaccines for the virus (388,697 reads).