Good afternoon and welcome to this week’s Thursday Brief. Surprise! Our weekly newsletter is a day early due to our office being closed form 17:00 today for the Easter Break, reopening on Tuesday morning.

The optimism appears to be growing in the manufacturing and engineering sectors and this was certainly holding strong on the final day of MACH last week, as bumper levels of business transactions were reported during the show. Check out more on the success of the show.

The MTA received the latest BEIS Bulletin this week which included some great stories. Please go to the story below to find out about a new ‘Energy Security Strategy’, ‘New investment in future energy technologies’ and a ‘New public body to boost energy resilience’.

BEIS have set out to improve their evidence base and further expand their understanding of the supply chains and production patterns ahead of the start of the negotiations. Make sure you take a look at the story below to read more about the new negotiations on a new set of free trade agreement (FTA).

Following the MTA signing the MoD’s Corporate covenant in 2016, a number of members also followed suit. In the story below you can see further information on the covenant and find out what you can do as a business to support.

The MTA’s Spring Economic update presentation this year will take place on Wednesday 11th May and will be held at the offices of MTA Associate Member, Forrest Brown in Bristol. Find out ore details below and don’t forget to register.

The National Sales Conference is Europe’s leading Personal & Professional Development event for leadership, sales, revenue & customer success professionals. To get the details and the date in your diary, check out the story below.

Some of the economic news is held over from last week when we were all at MACH but the headlines were in the manufacturing data from Monday which showed a month-on-month reduction in output thanks mainly to the supply chain shortages affecting the automotive industry and high gas prices hindering the chemicals industry, with a little bit of seasonal adjustment on top.  As a result, the monthly GDP data for the UK only showed growth of +0.1% for the month which was well below expectations.

We explore those data releases as well as the quarterly report on the sub-contract sector activity from Qimtek and the latest European investment and productivity figures.  Finally in this article, we signpost you to the CECIMO Economic & Statistical Toolbox which has data for the 4th quarter of 2021 for and related to the European machine tool sector.

Also, a reminder that the March edition of the MTA Business Survey is still open for your input via the online form at www.mta.org.uk/mta-business-survey-mar22 – MACH and Easter have delayed data collection a little, so we are keen to maximise the response rate quickly and would be grateful if you can spare a few minutes to participate in this survey.  For EIA members, your new quarterly is also still live – this questionnaire is at https://www.mta.org.uk/EIA-survey%20Q1-22 and we look forward to hearing from you.

For those companies who exhibited at MACH 2022, we will be circulating the Exhibitors Survey immediately after Easter – please look out for the email and take a few minutes to give us your feedback on what looks to have been a successful event – but we don’t know until you let us know how it went!

Thank you for keeping up to date with this week’s news! We hope you all have a wonderful Easter break and we’ll ‘see’ you again next week!