Good morning and welcome to this week’s Friday Brief.
The MTA are proud to continue support the Close Brothers SME apprenticeship programme along with the AMRC Training Centre. The programme has helped pay for 20 apprentices to support smaller businesses in the Sheffield City Region that might otherwise not be able to afford to take on an apprentice to boost their workforce. Full details of this great collaboration can be found within the Brief.
Brexit has of course been dominating the headlines this week and our Head of External Affairs Paul O’Donnell outlines the MTA’s position in the story below.
The European Commission is organizing (and partly financing) a mission for the Machine Tool industry to India/ IMTEX 2019. To find out more about the mission and if you and your company are eligible for funding please see the story below for full details and act quickly as today is the deadline for applying. The MTA will also be hosting a UK Pavilion at the exhibition which takes place next month.
The EEF's National Manufacturing Conference and Dinner takes place in London on 19th February 2019. The conference will bring together industry and thought leaders along with key policy makers for a day of analysis.
THREAD, the game-changing 3D printing process developed at the University of Sheffield Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC) has been a featured technology at a Spacecraft Additive Design Workshop held by the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (NASA-JPL) in San Pasadena, California.
CECIMO has decided to go forward with a meaningful description change that best reflects the industry the Association serves. CECIMO: will now be described as the European Association of the Machine Tool Industries and related Manufacturing Technologies.
There are twin and parallel economic stories this week with the manufacturing output and GDP data updates for both the UK and Europe. Starting at home, the manufacturing output data for October was quite weak, although it does seem to be concentrated in a the Automotive and pharmaceutical industries; where there is positive news, it is generally modest and with the service sector seeing a slower pace of growth, this impacts on the GDP data which, while still positive for the 3 months to October, is not a rapid as we saw in the 3rd quarter (the 3 months to September). In Europe, we only have monthly data rather than the rolling trends and although October 2018 was down on September 2018, it was up compared to a year earlier (October 2017) and there is good news here in that the Capital Goods industries was the best performing of the sub-sectors on both comparisons and for both the Euro-zone and the EU28. However, the European GDP data is less good news with a significant slowdown in the pace of growth led, worryingly, by a quarter-on-quarter fall in German GDP which drove down their annualised rate of growth; with Italy and France also seeing growth slowdown, this is something we need to watch closely as Europe will remain an important market for the UK, whatever the outcome of Brexit. Finally this week, we note that the latest report on the destination of investment grants in Scotland is now available – let us know if you want a copy of this report.
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.
