Friday Brief (13/10/2023) W41

Good afternoon and welcome to this week’s Friday Brief. The Autumn weather has eventually come around so unpack those jumpers and blankets to keep cosy.

To kick things off today The Engineering and Machinery Alliance, EAMA has sent a submission to the chancellor of the exchequer ahead of the autumn statement on November 22nd. One ask is for £500 million over eight years for a national, coherent programme to support SMEs adopt best technologies and processes across the manufacturing sector. EAMA has published a short video highlighting the value of the UK’s manufacturing sector, the huge opportunity available, and the role of trade associations. Take a look at this in the story.

CCMT 2024 will take place in Shanghai from 8 – 12 April 2024.The trade fair in 2020 and 2022 had to be cancelled due to the pandemic situation. CCMT 2024 will occupy the full trade fair venue in the Shanghai International New Exhibition Centre. Find out more below.

The MTA are looking to organise a UK Pavilion at the at the next edition of ‘IMTEX FORMING’, the International Metal Forming Technology Exhibition which will be held at the Bangalore International Exhibition Centre (BIEC), Bengaluru from 19-23 January 2024. The exhibition is sponsored by the Indian Machine Tool Manufacturers’ Association (IMTMA) which is one of the leading Metal Forming Machine Tool shows in Asia. Have a look at some more details in the story.

Today we have two BSI Standards awaiting your comments. The proposals read: Information technology — Security techniques — Part 8: Password-based key derivation and Additive manufacturing for metals — Qualification principles — Test method for indentation plastometry. Find the Scops and Purposes in the story below.

Complementing the round-up from the Conservative Party event in last week’s Friday Brief, Jack Semple, Secretary of EAMA (of which MTA is a member) has penned a summary of the discussions and debates that took place at the Labour Party conference this week, with a particular focus on those topics of most relevance to the manufacturing sector. This includes their likely relationships with business, the pace of technology, buying British, trade and metro Mayors – take a look at the article for more details.

This week saw the release of the manufacturing output data and UK GDP estimate for August; there was a partial bounce back from the weak figures in July for the economy as a whole but the manufacturing sector had another negative month, although the trend for the latest block of 3 months was positive thanks to a strong performance in June. However, the main significance was the incorporation of the revised data which mainly affects 2020 and 2021 – take a look at the UK economic news article for more details.

For Europe, we have the latest data on industrial production which while up slightly in august remains well below the levels we saw a year ago; the other item is a note on the figures for investment and profitability for the 2^nd quarter – both were weaker than in the first period of the year. In a separate article, we take a look at the new edition of the CECIMO Economic Toolbox and introduce the CECIMO Economic Dashboard which is available for MTA members via our new website – see the article below for more details and the relevant hyperlinks.

Finally this week, we have three surveys which are still in the data gathering phase – one for each part of the MTA family. The MTA Business Survey for September can be found at www.mta.org.uk/mta-business-survey-sep23, the EIA Quarterly Survey is at https://www.mta.org.uk/eia-quarterly-survey-3rd-quarter-2023; the UK section of the European Additive Manufacturing Survey, which was launched at the recent AM-UK forum meeting is at https://www.mta.org.uk/additive-manufacturing-trends-survey-autumn-2023.

That concludes the Friday Brief for another week. Thank you for keeping up to date with us and we look forward to ‘seeing’ you again next week!

CECIMO ECONOMIC TOOLBOX (2nd QUARTER 2023) AND DASHBOARD

CECIMO, the European group for associations representing machine tool manufacturers, has published the latest edition of its Economic Toolbox – this largely covers data for the 2nd quarter of 2023, although some monthly series have later figures. The Toolbox document groups information into 6 categories covering historical data for the sector, demand, investment, the business […]

ECONOMIC NEWS – EUROPE

European Industrial Production, August 2023: Eurostat also published its output data this morning, although the aggregate they quote is for Industrial Production (IP) – the largest part of this is manufacturing, but it also includes energy and utilities (but not construction). Also, the way in which Eurostat publishes these figures requires a lot of digging […]

ECONOMIC NEWS – UK

UK Manufacturing Output , August 2023: The data on manufacturing output released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) gives us the details of the revisions that first appeared with the UK national accounts at the end of September. While the overall GDP trends for most of 2023 were only tweaked slightly, there have been […]

Labour Conference Round-up

Labour wants partnership with business Economic growth and partnership with business were core themes of Labour’s annual conference in Liverpool this week, which the party said was its biggest in its history. The state will share the investment risks but must also have a share in the rewards, leader Sir Keir Starmer said. Manufacturing and […]

BSI Standards

Please be advised that a New Work Item Proposal has been loaded to the BSI Standards Development Portal for comment. Any comments received will be submitted to the national committee IST/33 “Information security, cybersecurity and privacy protection” for consideration when deciding the UK response to the associated Standards Development Organisation. Please visit https://standardsdevelopment.bsigroup.com/projects/9023-09346 Comment period […]

PROMOTE YOUR PRODUCTS TO THE INDIAN MARKET

The MTA are looking to organise a UK Pavilion at the at the next edition of ‘IMTEX FORMING’, the International Metal Forming Technology Exhibition which will be held at the Bangalore International Exhibition Centre (BIEC), Bengaluru from 19-23 January 2024. ‘Tooltech’ ‘Digital Manufacturing’ and ‘Weldexpo’ will be held concurrent to ‘IMTEX FORMING 2024’. The exhibition […]

CHINA CNC MACHINE TOOL FAIR 2024

CCMT 2024 will take place in Shanghai from 8 – 12 April 2024. The trade fair in 2020 and 2022 had to be cancelled due to the pandemic situation. CCMT 2024 will occupy the full trade fair venue in the Shanghai International New Exhibition Centre. The last show attracted 1,233 exhibitors from 23 countries and […]

Chancellor asked for long-term SME programme

The Engineering and Machinery Alliance, EAMA has sent a submission to the chancellor of the exchequer ahead of the autumn statement on November 22nd. One ask is for £500 million over eight years for a national, coherent programme to support SMEs adopt best technologies and processes across the manufacturing sector. The UK has an opportunity […]