Good morning and welcome to this week’s Friday Brief.

First up in this week’s newsletter, the MTA held our AGM and Member Forum this week in Birmingham and you can read the write-up of the events of day.

The AGM also featured the launch of a new book entitled the UK Manufacturing Review 2015/2016. The book covers the key events, progress and challenges across the manufacturing sector during the last twelve months, whilst also forecasting some of the breaking trends for 2016.

Last week saw a major international conference on Industry 4.0 hosted by the MTC and supported by the MTA. You can read more below and look at the presentations from the day too.

UKTI are hosting the twelfth meeting of the UK-China Joint Economic and Trade Commission (JETCO) and the inaugural meeting of the UK-Azerbaijan JETCO will take place in January and February 2016 respectively. They would be most grateful if you could please complete the following survey before Wednesday 23rd December to help inform the meeting https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/UK_Business_Survey_Identifying_Barriers.

Also in the news today Business Secretary Sajid Javid welcomes plans to make the heart of England greater than the sum of its parts by Firing up the Midlands Engine. Read what the Business Secretary had to say here https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/firing-up-the-midlands-engine and read what it means to the region below.

The CECIMO General Assembly took place in Brussels on 3 December 2015 find out what was discussed there in the story below

The November edition of the MTA Business Survey was launched at the start of the week.  With thanks to those who have already replied, we would encourage all members to participate; you can find the on-line form at http://www.mta.org.uk/mta-business-survey-nov15. 

The main economic news this week was the Purchasing Managers Indices (PMI) for the manufacturing sector around the world;  although the UK reading was lower than in October, last month looks like something of an outlier and the November figure was both a healthily positive 52.7 and up on what we had seen over the previous few months.  In the Euro-zone, there was a small improvement in November with the PMI standing at 52.8, but elsewhere in the world there are only a handful of countries with PMI readings at or above those of the UK and the Euro-zone, including Japan (52.6), Czech Republic (54.2), the USA (52.8) and Mexico (53.0).

That’s all for this week we’ll be back next Friday with more industry news.