Good morning and welcome to this week’s Friday Brief.
It has been a very busy week for the MTA with the press launch for the visitor campaign for MACH 2018 held yesterday. With just a few months to go before the doors open at the NEC in Birmingham, the team behind the exhibition are delighted to announce that visitor registration is now live. With the launch of visitor registration, it is also a great opportunity to let you all know about our smart badging system. This will provide every visitor with an interactive badge, allowing them to collect information from exhibitors in a quick and effective manner. Find out more below.
We, along with the University of Sheffield Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC), also launched a unique feature to demonstrate cost effective adaption of Industry 4.0 Technologies at MACH 2018. More details on this exciting project below.
This week also saw the second Budget of the year from the Chancellor, the MTA’s Head of External Affairs Paul O’Donnell takes a closer look at the content, spoiler it is not a long article.
Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) and West Yorkshire Consortium of Collages (WYCC) are keen to hear the view of employers, stakeholders and trade bodies, so that we can better understand future skills needs and skills gap. This will help shape the design of a new training programmes for women in STEM subjects. They would like to invite MTA members to a workshop/STEM sector forum, Tuesday 28th November 2017 2:00pm to 4:00pm at the Bar and Kitchen, Printworks Campus, Leeds City College, Hunslet Road, Leeds, LS10 1JY. More details below.
The CECIMO General Assembly, which took place in Brussels on 22nd November, announced that CECIMO machine tool production is expected to register a 2% annual growth in 2017 and reach 24.4 billion euro, rebounding from the last year’s drop slightly below 24 billion.
Our partner, Croner, are hosting a free webinar on GDPR and you are invited to join. GDPR stands for the General Data Protection Regulation, it will replace the data protection act and comes into force on May 25th 2018 across the European Union.
Apart from the budget, the economic news this week has mostly been in structural data series - we report on the release of data from the Annual Business Survey which gives industry level data on issues such as value added and investment and the breakdown of R&D spending which shows that the Automotive industry is the 2nd largest spender on R&D, with Aerospace the 4th largest industry (Pharmaceuticals tops the list and computer programming and software development is 3rd). The latest data from the ONS shows that profitability in the manufacturing sector remains at a high level - this serves only to make the investment data even more puzzling - although capital stocks in manufacturing are falling as a share of the total for the economy. The latest data on manufacturing technology and cutting tools demand in the USA shows that growth in both areas continues at a modest pace through the first 3 quarters of 2017.
That’s all folks, until next week, have a great weekend.
