Welcome the Friday Brief for the 17th June. The weather may not be delivering a lot of joy but there was cause for a celebration in the industry this week as Dr Tony Bannan, CEO at PTG Holroyd and an MTA Board member, was awarded an OBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours. Congratulations Tony!
There’s an opportunity to catch up with the MTA in South Yorkshire early next month as we hold the first of our new series of Regional Events hosted by Nikken in Rotherham. You can hear from MTA associate members Mathys and Squire about IP law and manufacturing PR guru Ross Coburn about getting manufacturers into the media. For further details please see the story below or email events@mta.org.uk.
There are several business opportunities in the Brief this week, with four emanating from UKTI in India and another from Ireland, full details in the stories below.
Lloyds Bank have been allocated the first tranche of funding to underwrite loans to businesses aiming to grow under the Government’s Help to Grow scheme, read on for all the details.
There was positive news in the European industrial production data this week; as with the UK figures last week, April was a good month and the capital goods sector is growing more strongly than industrial production overall. Trade figures for the 1st quarter of the year show an increase in UK exports of manufactured goods overall and growth for the key industry sectors, but overseas deliveries of machine tools were down sharply on the final period of 2015, although this does fit the normal seasonal pattern, so it is not as alarming as the raw data suggests. The final news item this week shows the weakness in the US manufacturing sector with news that machine tool orders and cutting tool sales are both running quite a bit behind the levels seen at this point in 2015.
Have a good weekend and enjoy the football!