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DEBATE MANUFACTURING
IN ASSOCIATION WITH:
MAKING THE RIGHT NOISES TO ADVANCE MANUFACTURING
Advanced manufacturing and aerospace have been badly hit by the Covid-19 pandemic.We brought sector leaders together with the Lancashire Enterprise Partnership to examine what the future will look like for these vital industries
Gordon Smith: The key issues for aerospace are the continuing uncertainties arising from the Covid-19 crisis, Brexit and net zero climate change demands.
With Covid-19 we’ve seen the collapse of commercial air travel and that cascades through the supply chain into massive reductions in airline purchases. We’ve seen the progressive reduction of stocks and then parts through the chain.
With Brexit, we see increased costs associated with preparation of paperwork, the additional logistics costs of stockholdings.
Then we see the impact of climate change, perhaps more for the medium-term, in terms of how that might affect demand for air travel and indeed the responses. All those things also have opportunities, but there are ongoing challenges both from the immediate effects and the continuing uncertainty.
If we let a section of the supply chain drop away it will be almost impossible to rebuild so we need to be re-energising.
I know the Lancashire Enterprise Partnership is working and mobilising the aerospace task force in the county and its report is key to actually showing how we can secure future investment.
Looking at the longer-term, the question is, what do we need for airlines to buy new aircraft that meet the requirements of climate change commitments? That gives you a whole new pipeline of innovation.
The infrastructure, both in terms of skills and assets like the AMRC NW, means the sector and the region are really well placed, if we have the ambition.
We’re engineers and we can make anything so we’ve asked, what’s required?
Wayne Wild: Apart from the extensive Covid challenges that everybody has had to deal with, the short-term issues we face are material supply and prices.
Steel prices have increased dramatically, 30-40 per cent over the last few months, mainly down to low supply chains, and 50 per cent of our outgoing sales are input costs of steel. We don’t know what will happen after January.
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