Good morning and welcome to this week’s Friday Brief.
We’d like to start this week’s newsletter by announcing that MACH 2014 is now a DOUBLE award winning show. Last night the MTA team picked up the Exhibition of The Year Award at the prestigious Trade Association Forum Best Practice Awards. We’d like to formally thank all of our members and exhibitors who put so much hard work into making MACH the envy of the trade association world.
It has been a big week at the MTA with the final of our annual Technology, Design and Innovation (TDI) Challenge. The finals took place on Wednesday 8th July at Yamazaki Mazak European Headquarters in Worcester and saw Geoffrey Sheir from Tonbridge School in Kent and Victoria Taylor from Balcarras School in Cheltenham pick up the top prizes in the 14-16 and 17-19 categories respectively. Further details on the winners and the awards can be found below.
The University of Sheffield Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC) with Boeing lent a hand to 35 students designing and manufacturing a single seat-racing car capable of accelerating from 0-60 mph in under five seconds.
During the General Assembly that took place in Bordeaux on 6 July 2015, CECIMO’s Economic Committee announced they expect that European machine tool production to grow 3% in 2015. There are more details below.
In the light of this week’s Budget, The Guardian ran an article on productivity featuring MTA member PP Electrial. The link to this story can be found in the newsletter and is well worth a read. You can also read the MTA’s take on the Budget – spoiler alert - we need to see the details.
This week’s main economic data is on manufacturing output; there is quite a contrast at the moment between strong growth in Aerospace and a continuing modest improvement for the Automotive and Metal Products industries, but we are still seeing a decline in output of the Machinery industry. The May figure was particularly weak and reversed modest gains we saw in the previous couple of months, but it remains a puzzle as to where these falls are coming from; unfortunately, there is no breakdown across this diverse sector until we get the detailed product output numbers, so it is difficult to know what lies behind this, although the problems in the oil & gas sector supply chain (products such as pumps and valves are part of the Machinery industry) must be at least a part of this trend. This week we also have the initial analysis of the PRODCOM data for 2014 and there is sheet available to download that updates the tables which were published in our recent Basic Facts Booklet.
That is all for this week, have a fantastic weekend from everyone at the MTA.