Good morning and welcome to this week’s Friday Brief.

Following the success of our first ever UK Pavilion at Metalloobrabotka last year, the MTA are returning to Moscow this May with a similar size pavilion. The pavilion will host a number of MTA members as well as an MTA stand, with events planned during the week. The event will be supported by the MTA’s Russian office with James Fudge and Igor Bazhenov working at the event. See the story below to find out how you can get involved.

MTA member MSP will be hosting a series of webinars and a seminar on overcoming manufacturing challenges. Hosted through Webex, the first Webinar will take place on 6^th March at 14:00 (GMT). The following two Webinars will be held at the same time on 2^nd April and 1^st May. See the story below for full details.

As a member of the MTA you get access to Croner services. Croner are expert consultants in Employment Law, HR, and Health & Safety, with a range of tools and services to help businesses. They are hosting a series of webinars throughout February on different aspects that could help your business. See the story below for full listings.

Dr Graham Siddall a retired Silicon Valley CEO whose life was changed by an apprenticeship has thrown his full support behind the 2019 AMRC Training Centre’s Apprentice of the Year ceremony - putting his name to two new achievement awards.

There is new scientific evidence from the International Agency for Research on Cancer that exposure to mild steel welding fumes can cause lung cancer and possibly kidney cancer in humans. The Workplace Health Expert Committee has endorsed the reclassification of mild steel welding fume as a human carcinogen.

The main UK data this week was the CBI Industrial Trends Survey which was better than might have been expected overall, but did show that the weakest industries for output were mostly the key purchasers of manufacturing technology equipment;  this highlights the turnaround that we have seen over the past 9-12 months when these industries were generally leading the way.  We also catch up with the European Industrial Production and GDP numbers that did not make it into last week’s edition;  these only served to emphasise that the weakness we are seeing in the UK is not concentrated here, with a sharp downturn in Europe in December that was led by the Capital Goods industries.  The European economy as a whole also weakened with GDP slowing in 2018, although the 2018 growth rate of +1.9% (+2.4% in 2017) for the Euro-zone was still quite a bit ahead of what the UK economy achieved.  We also have the end of year report from the US manufacturing technology market which showed strong growth for both machine tools (+19%) and cutting tools (+12.5%) in 2018 and there are some highlights from the UK trade data, focussing on the trade in goods in 2018.

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.