The MTA is pleased to announce that we have partnered with The Manufacturer magazine to bring you the National Skills Conference with the MTC and will help you do just that by bringing together manufactures, unions, policy makers and educators all in one place. The conference takes place on 15th and 16th October, full details on how to book can be found below.
On Wednesday 23rd September at the AMRC Knowledge Transfer Centre, Sheffield the MTA will be hosting our Members Forum. This is an opportunity for our members to feed in their ideas of how they would like to see the association run. The event is free and we would like to see as many of you there as possible please head over to our website to book your space here http://www.mta.org.uk/members-forum-23rd-september-2015
The MTA’s Head of External Affairs Paul O’Donnell attended a Triple Win Manufacturing Group meeting at Parliament. Read the report of this meeting below.
And in MACH 2016 news The Metalforming Machinery Makers' Association (MMMA) zone is now sold out, find out who is exhibiting in the story.
The Confederation of British Industry (CBI) has recently launched their 2015 Employment Trends Survey. The survey can be completed at https://www.snapsurveys.com/wh/s.asp?k=144015515410 and is open until the end of September.
UKTI have a couple of things that they would like us to draw your attention to. Firstly, UKTI is arranging an Advanced Engineering Day in St. Petersburg on the 29th of October 2015. The aim of the event is to showcase of British capability and excellence in new manufacturing and engineering technologies and a platform for dialogue between UK companies and Russian engineering majors and their key partners, such as service companies and equipment suppliers.
Secondly, UKTI is launching a new website called The GreatBritishStore.com. This new service is offered to UK companies as part of the First Time Exporter package and will be an option as part of the Exporting is Great campaign launched the Autumn. More details can be found below.
The main item of economic news this week is the rather disappointing data on UK manufacturing output which seems to have been weak in July and especially in some of the key sectors for our industry; we normally try to avoid focussing on one month alone, but it is worth noting that the sharp fall in the Automotive industry was expected following announcements from SMMT of data on car and engine output which were low in July because of a different pattern of holiday and upgrade shutdowns. This may also have affected the Metal Products industry (this includes general machining activity) which also saw a sharp fall in output, but it is less clear why the Machinery sector slowed sharply again, although the Oil & Gas sector will have something to do with this (equipment such as pumps and valves are part of the Machinery industry.
This week also saw the publication of Oil & Gas UK’s annual economic report and we report on its almost inevitably negative conclusions in this week’s economic news - suffice to say here that low oil prices do nothing to engender much optimism in this sector. The news on European GDP was a little brighter, although given the Sterling/Euro exchange rate, this does not necessarily help us either.
Thank you for reading we’ll be back at the end of the week with more industry news.
From everyone at the MTA have a great week.