21712 - SCTE Broadband Nov2022 COMPLETE v1

14 Vol. 44 No. 4 - November 2022 Issue The global development, manufacture and distribution of semiconductors was severely disrupted by Covid-19, but not for the reasons you might think. We’re over the worst of it but it’s still affecting supply chains now. Will it happen again? What have we learned? Semiconductors: A Love Story “Semiconductors may be to the twenty-first century what oil was to the twentieth. If so, the history of semiconductors will be the history of the twenty-first century.” Financial Times The pandemic of 2020 saw the acceleration of a number of trends that in March were only in their infancy; in the panic of lockdown worldwide they were adopted so fast, so unthinkingly by so many millions that is it difficult to even remember back to a world without Zoom, for example, or antibacterial gel. Ordering food via QR code in a restaurant is now normal, as is table service in pubs. (Queuing up in pubs is a rather unwelcome hangover from lockdown, however, and the sooner normal service is resumed, the better, SCTE feels). Disney+ brought forward its launch date by months, seeing the sizable opportunity of a captive audience of millions of people on furlough; it transformed the streaming market, sending complacent Netflix executives, deep in the red for years by then, into a tailspin after only a few weeks. Disney+, with 220m subscribers, is now the favoured service amongst consumers (which includes ESPN and Hulu) and in August, usurped Netflix’s number one position after only two years. Working from home is perhaps the biggest change, and according to some, the most stubborn stain to shift of all. The mental health benefits it has heralded have forced companies to change their approach completely, having resisted it for years, and you will see they now proudly announce hybrid working in job ads, support for mental health as part of their ESG commitments and cosy up to charities that would have been difficult to justify a few years previously. Admitting to a mental health problem in the 2000s would have been career suicide; things really have moved on apace. Another positive outcome. It wasn’t all great though was it. Bored, furloughed staff might have been gazing at the Star Wars franchise on televisions with glassy eyes, their thoughts straying only as far as the next meal and daily walk outside, but deep in lockdown the telecoms industry was becoming increasingly twitchy and at a loss, seeing its supply chain in disarray, gossip replacing facts wherever information failed. The semiconductor, so integral to the manufacture of broadband components and mobile phones, was suddenly unavailable. Lead times for component parts were suddenly weeks, if not months, and production schedules were thrown completely off course. It is overly simplistic to look back on the dearth of semiconductors and blame early lockdowns in Asia for creating an unholy bottleneck; it is a great deal more complex than that. The semiconductor market has grown exponentially over the last three years, after a fairly stable decade from 2006 scte long read By Melissa Cogavin, Managing Editor, SCTE