Good morning and welcome to this week’s Friday Brief.
First of all we would like to say a big thank you to everyone who attended our Annual Dinner last night at the Vox, on the NEC site in Birmingham. You can read a roundup of last night’s events below.
We’d also like to welcome to the MTA Board to the General Manager of Renishaw Stewart Lane. As well as joining the MTA Board Stewart has been also asked to sit on CECIMO Board for the European association for the machine tool industry. Find out more on this appointment below.
MTA members PP Electrical are hosting two free technical seminars at their Walsall headquarters in February and March respectively. To find out more details on the days programme and who will be speaking see below.
At the MTA we often get approached individuals and companies alike with commercial opportunities that may be of interest to our membership. This week we have three such opportunities featured in the Brief that we feel a MTA member might be able to help out with, please contact the MTA’s Technical Manager Ian Skeels for more information on iskeels@mta.org.uk
The main economic news this week is the release of the preliminary estimate for growth in the UK economy which showed a small acceleration (to +0.5% for the final quarter of 2015), giving growth of +2.2% for the year as a whole. Although this is slower than in 2014, the UK is still likely to have been one of the fastest growing G7 economies last year. Manufacturing activity for the year was broadly flat, but we will need to wait for the detailed figures in a couple of weeks to see the extent of the divergence in activity between the key end-user industries. There is some industry level data from the latest edition of the CBI Industrial Trends Survey which is also reported in this week’s brief; again, the news is somewhat mixed, but overall while not great, it is certainly not a disaster either!
That’s all for this week, we’ll be back next Friday with more industry news, until then have a great weekend from everyone at the MTA. Only enter text, no images or links