Good morning and welcome to this week’s Friday Brief.
As the General Election draws nearer, this week saw the main political parties publish their manifestos. You can read the MTA’s take on some of their business policies and access our own Election Briefing on the issue that effect manufacturing via the story below.
Our Head of Events and Member Services, James Fudge has been in Russia this week at Metalloobrabotka in Moscow. James joined our Russian Representative, Dr Igor Bazhenov to promote UK Manufacturing and meet with agents from UK Member companies.
While sanctions on Russia remain a challenge, a number of MTA members continue to do good business with companies in the country. We are evaluating the viability of a UK Pavilion at next year’s exhibition and urge interested companies to get in touch. Through our Russian Office the MTA offers a number of services on either a day rate or annual subscription. Further details on the MTA's Russian Office can be found here or by emailing James Fudge via jfudge@mta.org.uk.
MTA CEO James Selka will be speaking at the Stuttgart Moulding Expo which takes place from 30th May to 2nd June. Mr Selka will address the European Tooling Platform seminar, which will be located at the ISTMA Lounge in Hall 4 – C30. The seminar will take place on Wednesday May 31st at 14:30 (CET) and the theme of the talk will be Brexit and Manufacturing in UK. For more information please see the story below which also contains a link for MTA members to register for free tickets to the event.
For the third consecutive year, CECIMO is organizing the “Additive Manufacturing European Conference” (AMEC), which will take place on 7 June 2017 from 14.00 to 18.00 at the European Parliament in Brussels (Belgium). Co-hosts of the conference will be Anthea McIntyre (ECR) and Cora van Nieuwenhuizen (ALDE), Members of the European Parliament. AMEC speakers will discuss how the EU can help the adoption of industrial additive manufacturing in Europe.
Briway, a new member of the MTA is a UK company that acts as an intermediary for Chinese companies looking to source UK advanced technology. They currently have demand for servo and solenoid valves, see the below story for more details.
Siemens Financial Services has released a new research paper, launched at Hannover Messe 2017, which investigates the value of digitalization for manufacturers. It highlights manufacturers improving their performance through increased manufacturing productivity, improved planning and forecasting, enhanced competitive capabilities and greater financial sustainability.
The Future Manufacturing Awards 2017 are now open for entries. We would encourage you to help us spread the word about the awards and join in celebrating all the amazing success stories we have in the UK Manufacturing industry.
Especially if you missed last month’s forecast update and economic seminar you might be interested in a 20 minute webinar overview of the latest forecasts across the economy and manufacturing sectors being given by Lee Hopley, Chief Economist at the EEF. Find out how you can watch this in the story below.
The Bank of England’s Agents latest report notes an improvement in manufacturing output, supporting the ONS output data we covered last week. The data on industrial production for Europe also has parallels with the UK figures in that a weak picture for output overall hides strength in the capital goods industry, although, unlike the UK, this is only really in the longer annualised trend, with capital goods one of the weaker sub-sectors in the latest monthly data. This week, we also report on a generally good picture in the GDP data for Europe, although there is a mixture of strengthening and weakening patterns in the individual countries. There is also a note about the UK market and some analysis of the UK’s trade figures for the 1st quarter of 2017 in the economic news item below.
That’s all for this week, we’ll be back next Friday with more industry news, until then have a great weekend from every one at the MTA.
