Good morning and welcome to this week’s Friday Brief.
Last week we held the MTA’s Forecast Seminar for the UK market. We have now updated the presentations and these can be found in the member’s area via the link in the story below.
The MTA CEO James Selka will be representing the association at JIMTOF in Tokyo Japan. The MTA stand is located in the International area and if you would like to meet up with James during the week, just drop him an email to james.sleka@mta.org.uk to set it up.
Cyber Security is a hot topic at the moment and it is important to protect your business from any possible disruptions. We have two stories on this topic this week. The first being, the government backed - Cyber Aware #OneReset campaign is encouraging the nation to make #OneReset and take the simple step of having a strong and separate password for their email account to help protect their identity.
The second focuses on the ongoing negotiations between the European Parliament and the Council to set up an EU cybersecurity certification framework will have profound implications for the future of Europe’s industrial system, European companies being the first impacted by the final design of the framework. Find out more in the story below.
An MTA member company at the forefront of precision metrology software development and implementation, scooped two awards last week. The work metrology software products ltd (MSP) do within the technology and manufacturing industry was honoured and celebrated when they were awarded ‘Innovator of the Year’ at the Dynamites 18 Awards and winner in the 'Digital Engineering / Technology’ category at Insider Media’s Made in the North East Awards. Congratulations to MSP on your awards.
A toolkit designed specifically to help small and medium sized manufacturing firms tackle business challenges will be available free of charge to firms who take part in an innovative AMRC project looking at how productivity in SMEs is linked to effective leadership and talent management.
On Wednesday 21st November 2018 WMG are hosting a breakfast meeting on Maximising Data for Factories, the session will focus on how to improve data across the manufacturing line. Find out how to attend within the Brief.
This week saw the Secretary of State for Business, Greg Clark, officially opened Boeing’s first production facility in Europe on what was once the runway of Sheffield city airport.
The main piece of economic news this week was the results of the CBI Industrial Trends Survey; these were broadly consistent with other data in pointing to manufacturing having levelled off at a relatively high level. Both output and orders were described as stable, although the forward projection for orders is for a fall in the home market, but a rise in exports. Interestingly, respondents concerns that political/economic conditions abroad could limit export orders were at their highest since July 2016 – significant, of course, because that survey was the one in the immediate aftermath of the Brexit referendum. This survey also gave us a new look at investment intentions and this showed a sharp downturn for plant & machinery spending over the coming 12 months. The other piece of news this week was an easing of profit levels for manufacturing in the 2nd quarter; this was consistent with the investment data that came out a couple of weeks ag but, like that series, it remains at a healthy level in historical terms.
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.
