Friday Brief Intro (11/08/2023) (W32)

Good afternoon and welcome to this week’s Friday Brief! We hope you are all having a wonderful Summer Holiday!

To begin today’s newsletter, we would like to invite you along for lunch and to network with other MTA, EIA and AMUK Members at the AMUK Members Forum. The afternoon takes place in Rocester at J.C.B Excavators Group R&D Ltd on October 3rd 2023 from 13:00-15:00 with a lunch buffet provided. Check out the details below.

The Powering Up Britain publications announced that Government will develop a dedicated energy advice service for SMEs. The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero are now working with the design research team at Softwire to understand what small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) think about their energy use (e.g. electricity, gas or other fuels). Further details can be found in the story.

This week we welcomed a new MTA Member! FILCOM FILTERSERVICE LTD joined our Membership this week and you can now check them out on our website. Read a few sentences by them in the story below.

The MTA Forecast Seminar will be held on the morning of Thursday 19^th October at Cranfield University. Find the link to register your space in the story below.

It has been a busy morning with the publication of the data on GDP, manufacturing output, investment and trade (we will cover the latter of these next week) for June and, therefore the 2^nd quarter. Most of the news at least had a positive sign even if the growth in some cases is hardly anything to write home about. The UK economy overall grew by +0.2% in the quarter but this only gives an annualised rate of +0.4% – the best that can be said about this is that it was at least positive when a few months ago, many commentators were predicting a decline.

The good news was led by the manufacturing sector and, in particular, the automotive industry which saw very strong growth in the quarter (despite a pause in May because of the extra bank holiday) as it catches up on the order backlogs that arose because of the global shortage of electronic components. We have split this out in its own article below.

There is less good news in the investment data although the closing of the super-deduction scheme at the end of the 1^st quarter made it inevitable that we would see a fall in spending on ICT and other equipment (the asset type of most importance to us and the one targeted by the scheme). Overall business investment increased thanks to the arrival of new aircraft in April.

Finally, the July edition of the MTA Business Survey is still open for your input – you can do this via the online form at www.mta.org.uk/mta-business-survey-jul23. We are hoping to get this closed off towards the end of next week so, with thanks to those who have already replied, we hope that you can all spare a couple of minutes to let us have your input.

That concludes the MTA Friday Brief for this week! We hope you all enjoy your sunny weekend’s and we’ll ‘see’ you again next week!

ECONOMIC NEWS – UK ECONOMY Q2-2023

UK GDP, June & 2nd Quarter 2023: The other major announcement from the ONS this morning were the GDP figures for June giving us the 2nd quarter figures. We will concentrate on the quarterly figures but it is worth noting strong growth of +0.5% in June which is the fastest monthly rate since last October; […]

UK MANUFACTURING OUTPUT – Q2-2023

UK Manufacturing Output , June & 2nd Quarter 2023: The Office for National Statistics (ONS) released the June output data this morning – this showed manufacturing output growing by +2.4% compared to May. That month had seen output fall marginally and it seems most likely that this was caused by the extra bank holiday for […]

AMUK & NCAM Mastering AM: Sharing user experience 2023

Date: 7th September 2023 “Last run in 2019 by the MTC, Mastering AM is back for 2023 in collaboration between Additive Manufacturing UK (AMUK) and the National Centre for Additive Manufacturing (NCAM). Mastering AM is a conference for users of additive Manufacturing technologies where they will have the opportunity to exchange information and share best […]

MTA FORECAST SEMINAR

The MTA Forecast Seminar will be held on the morning of Thursday 19th October at Cranfield University. The agenda will follow the usual pattern; we will start with a look at the global economy, before moving on to the key parts of the manufacturing sector and concluding with our new forecasts for the machine tool […]

AMUK Members Forum – You’re invited!

You are invited to join AMUK for their annual Members Forum for the afternoon. We would like to welcome you along for lunch and to network with other MTA, EIA and AMUK Members. The afternoon takes place in Rocester at J.C.B Excavators Group R&D Ltd on October 3rd 2023 from 13:00-15:00 with a lunch buffet provided. Take a look at the […]

New MTA Member!

This week we welcomed FILCOM FILTERSERVICE LTD to MTA Membership. They have now been added to our members directory on our website so go check them out! Here is a couple of sentences from them – “Filcom manufacture & provide filtration solutions. We manufacture quality filters suitable for many OEM CNC Oil Mist applications. We […]

Friday Brief