Custom Fittings News & Blog

Fresh and Healthy Outlook for UK Manufacturing

There’s news this week that UK manufacturing is expected to show strong growth over the next 3 months, even though things seemed to have slowed down slightly over the last quarter. These figures come from the latest CBI Industrial Trends Survey. 16 of the 25 industry ‘sectors’ are expecting to see figures climb - excellent news for the UK’s economy, and great news for manufacturers up and down the country.

We are certainly feeling the benefits, as our catalogue grows and demand increases for our stainless steel fittings, both those manufactured on site and those bought into stock. This Industrial Trends Survey focused its attention on 414 manufacturers across the UK, and found that stock and order books were extremely strong in August and even exports recovered from the small dip they saw earlier in the year. One of the directors of the survey commented,

“Demand for British made goods remains buoyant and that’s helped drive this quarter’s further rise in output. Growth is broad-based, with the recovery spreading its roots, and firms have high hopes for the coming quarter. However, the recent rise in Sterling could impact on the resilient export orders we’ve seen lately. As a result, now is the right time to capitalise on boosting manufacturing further by taking action to strengthen the UK’s supply chains across industry. This will help unlock further growth and increase exports.”

Feeding into the positive energy seeming to envelope British manufacturing at the moment, another report from the Boston Consulting Group also gave a thumbs up for its short term future - one of the leading manufacturing consultancy agencies in the world.  Their report, released at the beginning of August 2014, cites the UK as now being one of the most affordable manufacturing locations in the western world, and that we’ve improved our position considerably compared to Europe and parts of Asia over the past ten years or so.

There has been some recent official analysis on the past decade in terms of manufacturing, and how various companies have performed. The ‘top 25’ countries were assessed and then feedback given on how they’d performed over the course of a decade. Very surprisingly, China had slipped massively, perhaps due to imported energy costs - and America had stormed ahead, probably due them capitalising on fracking, bringing energy prices down nationwide. The UK, despite pouring energy into renewable energy technologies stayed pretty much level, even improving slightly over the course of the decade. This has stood us in relatively good stead, although we could have done much better if some decisions had been made differently.