Good morning and welcome to this week’s Friday Brief.
Speaking about the risk of a ‘No Deal’ Brexit, Manufacturing Technologies Association CEO James Selka said “The manufacturing technologies sector is highly internationalised. All of our members have either international suppliers or international customers, frequently both, and they need the confidence that they will be able to work with them on a secure basis in the future.
The report from the CBI Industrial trends Survey this week provided an encouraging end to the year with output growth picking up over the past 3 months and although orders were down slightly overall, export orders accelerated to grow at their fastest pace since January. The weak point was the slower growth predicted for output over the coming 3 months, but it is still well above the long-run average and this may only reflect the holiday season. The US market continues to perform strongly with significant growth in both machinery and tooling in the first ten months of the year, although the pace did drop a little in October, but this is hardly surprising given that IMTS took place the previous month. This week’s economic news article also reports on some small revisions to the UK production data for 2016 and 2017 for our sector and the analysis of the UK’s exports and imports of goods by industry – did you know that more than half of our exports of manufactured goods are from the engineering industries?
Entire aircraft wing assemblies could be transported by intelligent, autonomous robots at the vast Airbus production facility in North Wales following a collaborative research project with engineers at the AMRC’s Integrated Manufacturing Group. Find out more in the story below.
EU negotiators this week agreed on CO2 emission rules for cars and vans, as the Austrian presidency of the EU defied expectations and brokered a compromise. But the deal has already been branded as both “insufficient” by green campaigners and “unrealistic” by the car industry. See within the Brief for more details.
Finally everyone at the MTA would like to wish our members a very Merry Christmas and a Happy and Healthy New Year, we’ll be back in 2019 with more industry news, until then enjoy the festive season.
