Good morning and welcome to this week’s Friday Brief, your round up all the week’s manufacturing news.
MTA CEO James Selka reacted to the positive PMI figures that were released for the UK manufacturing sector this week, saying “the PMIs show that the strong result for September was not just a “flash in the pan”, with another strong figure posted for October.” You can read James’ full comment in the below story.
Also this week, the MTA are pleased to announce the appointment of a new Chair for its Exhibition Committee, which oversees the organisation of MACH, the UK's premier manufacturing technologies event. Chris Pockett, Head of Communications at Renishaw, who has been a committee member for eight years, was appointed Chair of the Exhibition Committee due to his extensive knowledge and experience of international trade shows and event management. See the Brief below for full details.
Four leading engineering institutions have launched a new ‘Engineering Extravaganza’ to inspire youngsters to become engineers. The Institution of Engineering and Technology(IET), Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE), Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE), and Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining (IoM3), have joined forces to organise the Extravaganza as part of ‘Tomorrow’s Engineers Week.’
As part of the Erasmus Plus scheme which combines all the EU's current schemes for education, training, youth and sport, students on vocational programmes are sponsored to complete overseas work experience during their apprenticeship, to ensure they gain a wide range of skills. The MTA can help source you a student if you would be able to offer work experience. Please contact the MTA’s Education and Training coordinator on lpickering@mta.org.uk.
The MTC has been monitoring global developments in digital manufacturing technologies, as well as engaging on a national and European level, to bring you Digitising Manufacturing 2016 - the biggest international conference in the UK on the topic.
Be at the forefront of the digitisation of the UK manufacturing sector - join the MTC on 15th November 2016, more details on the event can be found below.
The October edition of the MTA Business Survey was launched earlier in the week; recent surveys have showed business doing quite well and we are keen to encourage as many members as possible to respond so that we can monitor the latest trends for the manufacturing technology sector.
You can access the on-line form at http://www.mta.org.uk/mta-business-survey-oct16 - we look forward to your participation.
There was generally good economic news in the data this week; although the UK PMI reading eased down slightly, it remains at a significantly positive levels and suggests that the Peak in September was not an outlier in the data. The PMI is useful at the moment as it reflects the contrasting impacts of the weak exchange rate in boosting export orders but also leading to an increase in (imported) input costs. Elsewhere in the world, most countries and regions saw an improvement in their PMI’s announced this week. We also saw steady growth in the European economy as a whole reported by Eurostat and the European Commission’s economic sentiment index saw an improvement – the latter data release also reflected an improvement in capacity utilisation rates for the region as a whole although, inevitably, the individual country trends vary.
That is 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
