Good Morning and welcome to this Week’s Friday Brief.
Firstly, we’ve a final reminder that the MTA’s Annual Forecast Seminar is being held next Thursday 17th of October at Yamazaki Mazak in Worcester. There will be presentations from Oxford Economics, including from CEO Adrian Cooper, to help you make sense of a world economy that is convulsed with change at the moment. The MTA’s Statistician Geoff Noon will be presenting our annual forecasts for the machine and cutting tool markets. It’s always a popular event but the are still a few seats left so register here .
With the economic uncertainty that we are experiencing it is more important that ever that the MTA can get a sense of how our industry is performing in near real time. To that end please take a few minutes to fill out our Business Survey here . Of course Brexit is only one cause of the uncertainty that we’re seeing but you can find out more about how to prepare for a No Deal exit via the CBI’s online tool here .
Looking a little further ahead, due to operational reasons the date of the AGM has had to be changed from the 4th December to the 3rd December. The venue remains the Cutler’s Hall in Sheffield, look out for more details in the coming weeks.
Even further ahead, the MTA will be hosting a UK Pavilion at Metalloobrabotka in Moscow in May of next year. The international presence at the exhibition, the largest in the Russian market, has been growing in recent years and next year will see us in an enhanced position in the Halls. You can find out more below.
Yesterday saw the MTA host an event at Factory 2050, part of the AMRC, centred around the legacy machines project that was so popular at MACH 2018. This saw simple, affordable, senor technology fitted to old machines to bring them into the Industry 4.0 era. You can find out more below.
In MACH News this week, we were able to confirm that Mission Automotive, part of the Mission Motorsport the charity that we supported at the Annual Dinner, will be joining us at the NEC in April. They work with businesses within the automotive industry to help them match the talents and experience of service-leavers to employment opportunities in a sector that needs their skills and expertise, more below.
Turning back to economics, there is quite a bundle of, mostly UK news, this week. Much of it is dominated by the recent re-write of economic history by the ONS. The headlines come from the manufacturing output data which is mostly negative and even the only positive trend - the short-term increase in automotive output - is not good news because it reflects a less than complete recovery of output from the pre-Brexit shutdowns that took place in April. The increased level of output in August (because the usual factory shutdowns have already happened) has not yet made up the gap from April. All of the other industries that we track show a negative trend in the latest output data. We now also have the detailed investment data for the 2nd quarter and these show a sharp fall for manufacturing; there is a smaller reduction for the Engineering & Vehicles industry, but the revised Q1 figures show that this took place a quarter earlier in this specific industry group. The monthly UK GDP figures that flow from the output data point to modest growth in the 3 months to August despite that month itself being negative. We also take a look at the data from Eurostat that suggests that investment in the Euro-zone was exceptionally strong in the 2nd quarter (in short, we are not sure it is valid) while profitability fell again, before returning to the UK to consider yet another fall in productivity, which was especially steep in the manufacturing industry - again data revisions may be a significant part of this story.
Thanks for reading, we hope to see you next week at the forecast seminar.
