Good morning and welcome to this week’s Friday Brief.
This week we have a report from MTA CEO James Selka on his visit to IMTEX 2017 out in Bangalore, India last week. James reports on a vibrant show with plenty of opportunities available for British manufacturers. If you are interested in opportunities to go to India and attend IMTEX in the future please contact the MTA’s Head of Events James Fudge at jfudge@mta.org.uk.
You can also read what the Industrial Strategy Green Paper means for MTA members and how the association will be engaging with the consultation on it. If you would like to contribute to the MTA’s policy making process on this please contact Paul O’Donnell Head of External Affairs podonnell@mta.org.uk.
Congratulations once again from everyone at the MTA to Board member Dr Tony Bannan, Chief Executive Officer of Rochdale-based Precision Technologies Group (PTG), on being appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List 2016. Tony received his award from HRH the Prince of Wales last week.
NIKKEN Kosakusho Europe are pleased to announce their “Beyond Innovation” series of Industry Events for 2017, beginning on 7th-9th February. The first event is scheduled to be a three-day open house focussed on pushing the boundaries of machining in the Automotive and Motorsport sectors. Find out how to attend this event in the story below.
Dormer Pramet has thrown its support behind the training of the UK’s next generation of engineers. The global cutting tool manufacturer and MTA member has become a patron of the Manufacturing Technology Centre’s state-of-the-art training centre - the Lloyds Bank Advanced Manufacturing Training Centre (AMTC).
The MTA business survey for January 2017 is now open and we’d really appreciate if members could take the time to fill it in here www.mta.org.uk/mta-business-survey-jan17.
There was generally good news from the Purchasing Managers (PMI) data published this week with most countries growing and/or at a high level; the UK saw a marginal reduction compared to December 2016, but at 55.9 this remains a very strong number, with output growth particularly high. This week’s meeting of the MPC was accompanied by the latest Inflation Report in which, while there was little change to the expected profile for inflation (growing to a peak of +2.8% in the first half of 2018), the Bank of England upgraded its forecast for the UK economy for 2017 to +2.0% (which would match the current estimate for 2016). There was further good news from the European Commission’s economic confidence data which showed a small improvement (although not for the UK) and manufacturing capacity utilisation rates edged up - the UK did share in this trend. Finally, data from Eurostat economic growth in Europe slowed slightly in 2016 (compared to 2015), but we don’t get the country-by-country figures for a couple of weeks.
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.
