Good morning and welcome to this week’s Friday Brief.
The MTA is pleased to announce that a new Members’ Forum will be held on Wednesday 23rd September at the AMRC Knowledge Transfer Centre outside Sheffield. The networking event will also feature a key note speaker Adrian Allen OBE, Commercial Director, AMRC. Please register your free space at www.mta.org.uk/members-forum-23rd-september-2015.
The latest edition of the CECIMO magazine is out now we have a PDF version of the magazine available for your reading pleasure here - www.cecimo.eu/site/fileadmin/Magazine/CECIMO_magazine_AM_edition_2015.pdf.
As Iran begins to open up its economy to the rest of the world after sanctions have been lifted, UKTI have asked our members to fill out a questionnaire. The focus of this is research aims to gauge opinion on the latest export opportunities which are opening up there.
The Association has received an agency enquiry from Shenyang Yihua Hengda Machinery Equipment Co. Ltd in China to supply machine lighting and other products for the machine tool industry. Please contact Richard Griffiths, Technical Manager: Tel 0207 298 6400 or Email: rgriffiths@mta.org.uk for more details.
The Design & Technology Association (DATA) are planning the launch of a high profile campaign this September to highlight the critical shortage of qualified secondary and well trained primary D&T teachers. DATA will be asking for quotes from companies and/or other high profile work colleagues about the importance of D&T education. If you would like to support this important initiative get in contact with James Fudge via jfudge@mta.org.uk.
MTA Member's Hexagon Metrology has been supporting a program to help Inspire tomorrow’s engineers, find out how they are going about it in the story below. The Manufacturing Technology Centre at Ansty Park near Coventry is launching a major drive to recruit more than 100 highly-skilled engineers and trainee engineers.
MTA Associate Members Moore Stephens’ have some important information for members about R&D tax relief. More details can be found within the Brief.
There was some good news for the economy this week with an acceleration in growth, but within the total, manufacturing output fell slightly in the 2nd quarter, so we will have to wait for next week for the detailed figures to discover where within the sector this has come from. This was also contradicted slightly by the latest results from the CBI Trends Survey which pointed to manufacturing output expanding - and expected to continue to do so in the next quarter - but they are very different sources which covers the different views. The CBI survey also reported a small improvement in investment intentions, but a fall in capacity utilisation, although both trends are above long-run average levels.
Have a good weekend.