Good morning and welcome to this week’s Friday Brief.
Excitement levels have reached fever pitch as MACH 2016 flings open its doors on Monday morning. We are very excited to announce that Olympic cycling hero Sir Chris Hoy MBE will be performing the opening ceremony at 10:00 am.
The build-up is of course well under way already with all the heavy lifting done and the stands taking shape across the Halls. Its already looking really impressive as our twitter followers at @MACHexhibition have been able to see.
Demand for apprenticeships at AMRC Training Centre soars. Since taking on its first 140 apprentices in autumn 2013, the AMRC Training Centre has grown rapidly into an award-winning centre of excellence with over 400 employed-status apprentices. Find out more about the great work the AMRC do in the story below and also check them out at next week at MACH 2016 in the Learning and Development Zone.
The UK Northern Powerhouse Skills Summit, will take place on 13th July at Sheffield Hallam University. This event was created as one of the next steps from the UK Northern Powerhouse International Conference in Manchester in February and reflected a concern amongst business leaders that the skills deficit was one of the most pressing challenges to achieving the rebalancing the UK economy. More details on how to attend this event can be found within the Brief.
The TRAM conference will take place this September in Chicago alongside IMTS and the organisers are looking for people to submit 200-300 word abstracts for review for inclusion in the 2016 conference. All entries must be in by 1st May and details on how to apply are within the story.
The MTA’s Technical Manager Ian Skeels attended the ManuFuture Innovate UK event in London this week. The conference has called for participants to get involved with the ManuFuture project which meets to discuss UK and European future manufacturing innovation. If you’re interested in participating please contact Ian for more details on iskeels@mta.org.uk.
This week we are releasing our updated forecasts for the UK Machine Tool and Cutting Tool markets; general economic conditions and a less positive outlook for the key customer industries (taken together) form the background to a small downgrading of our forecasts compared to last Autumn. The Machine Tool forecast is complicated by the timing of a large one-off contract which appears to give a much weaker forecast for 2016, but in reality, the underlying trend is that the fall in the market took place in 2015 and we expect a broadly flat trend for 2016. It is worth emphasising that despite the negative numbers in the outlook, both the Machine Tool and Cutting Tool markets remain above where they were before the recession took hold, so the market is at a good, if not spectacular level. We also have the latest edition of the Global Machine Tool Forecast available to download - please see the article below for details of how to get hold of these documents and for news of an Economic Update presentation at the forthcoming MTA Members Forum meeting.
Data on manufacturing output was the main economic news this week with manufacturing output falling by -1.1% month-on-month; we saw some unusual trends in the monthly data, perhaps most notably, a sharp fall in the Automotive industry which had its worst month since the shutdown affected July 2015, but it is important to realise that monthly data can be volatile and we really need to wait to see if this is just a small blip or if something else is going on in the data. Earlier this week, we saw the announcement of near record car sales in the UK in March with the registration change which makes this fall in output all the more puzzling.
That’s all for this week, we look forward to seeing a lot of you next week at MACH 2016, until then have a great weekend from everyone at the MTA.Only enter text, no images or links