UKC

I saw this this morning

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-26657455

"Hitachi to move rail business to UK from Japan"

Not every day large manufacturing outfits decide to down tools and move to the UK. Is this a sign of things to come as the standard of living and transport costs start to rise in the East?

In reply to ByEek:

It never really went away. Sure the headline big heavy industries have shrunk but a lot of the skills went in to more specialised sectors.

A case in point: textiles - there's no way UK manufacturing could compete with newer overseas factories along with their cheaper (than us) workforce so that part of the industry went overseas. This is why you can buy a cotton t-shirt for some ridiculous price.

The UK textile industry then moved in to high value, high margin sectors like medical dressings. There are currently around 100,000 people working in the UK textile industry - hardly a non-existant industry.

Similar things have happened with other manufacturing industries.

In reply to ByEek:

Cue the old cliché "If we leave the EU we won't be able to export any of these trains".

In reply to silhouette:
Isn't it a case that if we leave the EU, we will still have to implement a whole raft of EU law (that we would have no say in) in order to be able to export said trains to EU member states?

In reply to ByEek:

There's also things like GATT where we agree trade tariffs with the rest of the world. Currently we are part of the EU trading block so all the agreements relate to that. If we were to leave the EU then all these agreements would need to be renegotiated, quite how long that would take is anyone's guess but it wouldn't be overnight.

In reply to Bob:

'It never really went away.'

Might have to disagree there for Engineering manufacture.

In reply to bradzy_c:


Yes, it did shrink, but I understand that's starting to come back to the UK, here and there, too, as companies realise that they can't be sure about the quality of aluminium (for instance) in China. Orange (the UK MTB brand) has decided that due to the corruption there, they can't trust that a block of aluminium doesn't have a bribe somewhere in it's certification.

Anecdotally, I heard about a company which make crankshafts who moved it's manufacturing over there, and then had it's products fail and at great cost had to restart from scratch manufacturing in the UK again.

The UK does still have a name for quality, even if it doesn't do quantity like it used to. Field Cycles (Field Bikes?) a steel bike frame builder from Sheffield, is using it's location (and the history associated with steel things coming out of Sheffield) to market itself overseas. Which is nice.

That's not to say that all manufacturing in China is potentially dodgy, more that it's easier to know what's going on within the UK.

In reply to bradzy_c:

http://www.fieldcycles.com/

Field Cycles, the founder has a cool Italian sounding name, he's a friend of a friend, but it's possible that's not the brand image they wanted.

In reply to ByEek:

In my line of work I've had the pleasure of visiting several reasonably high tech engineering companies who are innovative and deliver high quality products. These people can really think round a problem and build a solution which does what I want. I have been pretty impressed, as I thought that these companies had gone for good, but are actually doing pretty well.

As a country we may not be the manufacturing powerhouse that we once were, but I think for 'special' stuff, we are good. From the little that I've seen, I think now is a good time to get into engineering.

Again from what I've seen, I wouldn't be surprised if more manufacturing came back. With hyper inflation in the far east, quality problems and staff retention issues, we are finding that cheap isn't always good. Public attitudes to sweatshop labour also quite rightly have an effect on brands. In my field we are, to use the cliche, working smarter, using automation and adding value such as data managed processes to ensure tracability and quality. We are almost competing on price but winning on quality. Luckily in my field, quality is important.

In reply to markAut:
I work in oil related engineering, and we've used Chinese sourced steel several times, only to find it full of impurities, voids and generally unfit for purpose. Measuring equipment and other tooling has been tried and rejected numerous times as poor quality.