Good morning and welcome to this week’s Friday Brief.
The All-Party Manufacturing Group, will be holding a Reception at the House of Lords on the 13th July 4:00pm – 6:00pm. For more information on this event please email Head of External Affairs Paul O’Donnell at podonnell@mta.org.uk.
We are altering the relationship that we have operated over the last two years with Craig Chen in our China offices and his staff in a joint PPMA/MTA in Shanghai. As a result of a review their business, the PPMA decided to withdraw from the Office which, as a result has now closed. We will continue to offer support via Craig and the team; more details on this in the below news story.
The MTA have launch their new events calendar for the coming year details all of our major networking opportunities. You can download the calendar from the below story.
We would also like to introduce our new Head of Events, Jeanette Ives, who will oversee the delivery of the MACH Exhibition as well as planning the design and delivery of a dynamic MTA Events Programme. Join us in welcoming Jeanette to the MTA team.
Also, we would like to say congratulations to Group Rhodes, who ranked 29 in the Sunday Times top 100 SME exporters in the UK.
In economic news, there are some mixed signals from the data published this week. Across two reports from the Bank of England, they expect the period of deflation in the UK to be short as price changes pick up towards the end of this year and, following on from this, they are predicting solid growth for the economy overall. In the latest report from their Agents, manufacturing output growth remains modestly positive and there has been small improvement in investment intentions, with some indications of spending to expand capacity. Euro-zone Industrial Production dipped slightly, but the overall trend is still positive, but the latest orders data from the US is showing a fall in machine tool orders (but with a sharply mixed regional pattern), although their cutting tool data is positive.
That is all for this week, have a fantastic bank holiday weekend and we’ll be back next Friday.