Good morning and welcome to this week’s Friday Brief.
This week saw the final of our annual school competition the Technology, Design and Innovation Challenge. This took place at Yamazaki Mazak’s European Headquarters in Worcester. The judging was split into two age groups; 14-16 years old and 17-19 years old, with one winner and two runners-up chosen from each group.
In the 14-16 year old category the award was won by Christopher Kalogroulis from Sutton Grammar School for Boys with his Stackamals project – a unique range of animals created from laser cut sheets of MDF, that can be used to store valuables. The winner of the 17-19 category was Ben Noar from Highgate School with his spherical wheel, designed to enable ease of movement. Full details on the event can be found below.
Warwick University are hosting an event next Friday to be delivered by lawyers Pinsent Masons explain what Brexit means for UK manufacturing. The session will cover an explanation of the mechanism under the Lisbon Treaty by which the UK Government initiates the process of withdrawing from the EU and a review of the potential alternative trading arrangements between the EU and the post-Brexit UK. For details on how to attend the event see the below story.
In a telling example of reindustrialisation the first custom-built steel foundry to be commissioned in the UK since the early 1980’s has been unveiled at AMRC Castings, part of the University of Sheffield’s Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC) with Boeing.
The EPSRC Centre for Innovative Manufacturing in Ultra Precision will be holding its annual Precision Engineering Industrial Short Course at Cranfield University, UK, 19-23 September 2016.
We have a reminder about the MTA business survey, which this month includes questions about Brexit, so completing it will help inform MTA policy going forward.
The main economic news this week was the UK manufacturing output figures for May which were generally quite positive, although the extent of this depends a little on which industry you look at. This data is, of course, pre-Referendum, so it will be interesting to see how this develops through the rest of the year. The Automotive industry is powering ahead following a couple of weak months early in the year but, although at a high level, the Aerospace sector appears to be levelling-off rather than growing significantly; there was some good news with a small improvement in the Machinery industry, but this remains the weakest of the industries that we track each month.
That’s all for this week, we’ll be back next Friday with more industry news, until then have a great weekend.