Good morning and welcome to this week’s Friday Brief.
As usual at this time of year, MTA has updated the forecasts that we published last autumn - of course, this now includes the UK cutting tool market forecast that we introduced last year. These have seen a small downgrading of our expectations for both the UK machine tool and cutting tool markets this year - in the former case, this is mainly due to a stronger than expected end to 2014, while the cutting tool forecast is affected by lower than expected output in some key customer sectors at the start of 2015. The article below gives a little more background to this and, of course, the link to the documents on the web-site, where you will also find the Spring 2015 Global Machine Tool Forecast documents.
Three MTA members have this week received the prestigious Queen’s Award for Enterprise. Holroyd Precision, Renishaw PLC and Unison were amongst more than 100 British businesses to have received a Queen’s Award to recognise their contribution to enterprise.
We are also pleased to announce that the MTA will be working with Close Brothers and the AMRC “Close Brothers SME Apprentice Programme”. The scheme will see Close Brothers contribute to the cost of apprentices for 20 SMEs who might otherwise be unable to afford to take on a new apprentice.
The MTA have been at CIMT in China this week hosting the British Pavilion, you can read Head of External Affairs Paul O’Donnell’s report of the event.
Made Here Now, the brainchild of former Financial Times Manufacturing Editor Peter Marsh, was unveiled in front of 150 people on Thursday night (23rd April) at a reception held at New London Architecture (NLA). You can view the new website here http://www.madeherenow.com/home/project
And to round off this week’s edition of the Brief we have economic news which features the Bank of England Agents’ Summary of Business Conditions, April 2015 and Investment Grants in Scotland and the English Regional Growth Fund.
Have a great weekend from everyone at the MTA.