Good morning and welcome to this week’s Friday Brief.
Firstly, we would like to start by saying a big thank you to everyone who attend the MTA Annual Dinner in London last night. It was a great occasion with 500 guests in attendance. MTA President Geoff Bryant gave the keynote speech with a call that highlighted how the MTA can make a difference for its members in areas like; exporting, policy and education. Find out more in the story below.
MACH 2018 will be officially opened (on 9th April) by the most successful sailor in Olympic history, Sir Ben Ainslie. Sir Ben won medals at five consecutive Olympics from 1996 onwards, including gold at the four Games held between 2000 and 2012.
The MTA Business Survey for January is still open for your responses; while we have had a reasonable number of replies so far, more is always better, so we would encourage you to get your data and opinion back to us as quickly as possible. The on-line form at www.mta.org.uk/mta-business-survey-jan18 is still open - we look forward to hearing from you.
CECIMO, the European Association of the Machine Tool Industry, and EPMA, the European Powder Metallurgy Association, have signed an agreement, which aims at promoting additive manufacturing through diversified actions. Find out more about this in the story below.
BSI are hosting a live webinar on 'Path to GDPR' Series - #8 Privacy Impact Assessments (PIAs), this takes place on Thursday 22nd February between 10am and 11am, more details on the agenda can be found in the story below.
The data on manufacturing output that was published by the ONS this morning continues to reflect the strength in this part of the UK economy and, as we have seen for most of 2017, it is the capital goods industries that are leading the way. Aerospace set yet another record in December, the Machinery industry ended the year at its highest since 2014 and even Metal Products (which has been in the doldrums for some time) had a strong end to the year with the quarterly output level at its highest since the 3rd period of 2008. The one weak spot was the Automotive industry where output fell in the final quarter of the year, but despite this and some weakness earlier in the year (because of model changes), it still managed a smidgeon of growth for 2017 as a whole to set a new record in the 20-year series. The other news item this week is the European Commission’s Economic Sentiment Indicator which fell back slightly in January, but remains at a very high level, so we need to watch this over the next couple of months to see if this is a turning point or just a pause.
That’s all for this week, we hope you have a great weekend and we’ll be back with more industry news next Friday.
