Good morning and welcome to the Friday brief for the 16th June. Last week saw the MTA represented in Brussels for the third annual Additive Manufacturing European Conference in the European Parliament. You can read about this fast growing part of our industry below.
It’s the time of year that thoughts turn to TDI Challenge and this week saw the announcement of the finalist for 2017. There are some fantastic projects which will be showcased at the Finals Day at Yamazaki Mazak on 5th July, which highlight some of the great work that is happening in D&T in schools – even more of a reason to champion the subject as we aim to do
This week’s brief includes two opportunities to find out more about trade with major export markets, namely the USA and India. The American event looks at understanding some of the difficulties and opportunities of building trade there. The India event is a manufacturing summit in the UK Parliament which MTA members are eligible to attend. Full details of both below.
Next week is sees International Women in Engineering Day. There are events to get involved in around the country aimed at promoting the role of women in engineering. Find out more in the story.
Acquiring data to use in your marketing is a challenge for many businesses. We have an opportunity to find out how to utilise free sources through a webinar run by marketing agency Arkevista, check it out below.
The AMRC has announced the successful completion of a major, ATI backed, project in the field of high accuracy robotic machining creating one of the world’s largest robotic machining facilities for Electroimpact, an aerospace company in Deeside.
As has been common recently, the headline data on manufacturing output in the UK was rather disappointing, with a fall of -0.7% in the latest 3 months, but this is mainly in the Pharmaceutical industry and the more detailed industry figures are much brighter with growth continuing in the Machinery, Aerospace and Automotive industries.
The picture in Europe is rather different, although because this data looks only at monthly trends, it can be more volatile; here we saw output of the capital goods industries fall in April (compared to March), although it was higher than a year ago. We also have the latest data on machine tools and cutting tools from the USA where the market in the first 4 months of the year is running ahead of the levels we saw a year ago – in the case of machine tools, this is the first time this has happened for a while.
That’s all for this week, enjoy the sunshine.