The Zohan

OK slightly tongue in cheek but with Ryton going from the Midlands this week and the associated companies supplying widgets to them i wonder just how much manufacturing still goes on, not just assembling of imported goods. to get around restrictions

Does anyone work in manufacturing, if so what and have you seen changes/trends or any writing on the wall over the past 10 years.

Ta

hamyam

Hi i work for BOC Edwards which manufacture vacuum pumps. When i started there 6 years ago they were investing millions into the site with new units and machines etc. We are now being sold to a german company for a reported 8.2 billion and our future is very uncertain, as you said all manufacturing seems to be leaving this country good old labour hey

fitzscoob

Hi Paul

My Dad started our family business up 22 years ago now. We manufacture leather goods for London's West End stores and the majority of the 5 star hotels here and abroad.

The type of items we are talking about are Photograph Albums (including binding the board together), blotters, conference folders, place mats etc etc.

We are at the top end of the market, with our items being expensive (if you buy them from retailers).

Work as we know it is very tough. The vast majority of jobs where we would make profit (higher quantities) now generally get produced abroad.

We are in a niché market still, and there is a demand for the highest quality items. The sad fact is that its very very tough to continue manufacturing from scratch.

When you think about profits and the amount of work that goes into making the items it can be slightly soul destroying.

wilftwo

Car production in UK will remain close to 1970s record levels even with loss of Ryton.

lozgti

UK is an empty shell save for all the takeaways.

Petem95

Difference today though is all the manufacturers are not UK owned, and the factories employ far fewer people now as its all done by robots.

lightning101

Most of the worlds money can still be traced back to the UK, manufacturing industry or not

The Zohan

Case in point

http://bbs.scoobynet.co.uk/showthread.php?t=509506

Jonathan Davies

Didn't they assemble imported goods at Ryton then? I thought part of the problem was that 206 parts were imported from the continent, pushing costs up.

I'd say UK manufacturing has been declining more or less at the rate that UK living standards have increased... wages up, cost base up ==> manfacturing facilities moved to cheaper places. That's been happening for 40-odd years I'd say, or more maybe. When did the UK textile industry give up? Maybe longer ago than that even.

I don't see what can be done about it myself. Our services and goods need a high value-added element to sustain the high costs of producing them here. We can't just supply the home market at inflated costs, cos it's not big enough by a long way. France, Germany and Italy are finding that out now... VW couldn't sustain their high cost base/premium price model, and neither Italian handbag makers.

dpb

That seems a slightly vacuos statement - at one time brittania ruled the waves..

Ray_li

When I started just over 2.5 years ago everything were made in England but for the past 1.5 years we have been importing from India and China but we still claim Made In England

Give it another 2-3 years and we can close the factory down and keep a warehouse

with the extra savings buying from abroad do you think we lowered our prices? No we put the prices up

fitzscoob

You have to do a certain percentage of work on the item in England to claim 'Made in England'

Ray_li

Some items we do others we pack into a box

dpb

rebadging expenses no-doubt...

fitzscoob

lol

Unfortunately thats the way lots of standard corporate items have gone in my industry.

Take something regular like a zipped conference folder, ok the ones from China look naf but they do the job - you can buy them from China for about a fiver.

In reality, a folder like that can take 30 / 60 minutes to make, add about £15.00 worth of leather and materials into the mix and all of a sudden you are looking at £30 before you put a mark up on the item. Of course this would look a hundred times better than the one above, but unfortunately some people just look at the price rather than the product.

Or they dont have huge budgets to spend.

MikeCardiff

iTrader: (2)

The problem with China ( and India to an extent ) is people taking a very short sighted view. Chinese workers are already demanding a higher standard of living - more in line with Westerners - and their wages will have to go up to meet it, and this will push up the manufacturing prices.

Anyone remember not that long ago when all cheap products had MADE IN JAPAN on them ? then when Japan got too expensive, they had MADE IN HONG KONG, and you dont see that any more either.

Chinese and Indian prices will go up and up until it isnt any cheaper to buy in from them than to make in the UK - after this there arent any nations really developed enough to manufacture goods where the workers will accept peanuts - Africa could be, but it would cost too much to get the infrastructure in place.

If we're lucky by the time all this happens we may still have a workforce skilled enough to produce things - not just people who only know how to work in a shop or call centre.

Flatcapdriver

The UK is a tertiary economy, so what's the problem? The LSE is the largest international trading floor in the world, it is the centre for trading in Eurobonds etc despite not being in the Euro and the UK has some of the most sophisiticated service sector companies in the world and the UK still manufactures more cars than it ever did.

As economies evolve, they change the way they operate with the UK merely being further ahead than countries such as France and Germany, which will inevitably lose a large chunk of their manufacturing base to Asia.

wilftwo

Turn the clock back a hundred years in British history and you would find people worrying about the same thing.

Its not a modern problem.

DaveD

iTrader: (2)

To answer the original question, I work for Rolls-Royce (the jet engine manufacturer not the badged cars) and we still make stuff in the UK
Massive investment in the past few years means that there is world-leading manufacturing technology being installed at various sites in England and Scotland - can't see any of this being transferred out of the UK in the near future.

Da Booga

I've got a business that manufactures pine furniture & wooden garden products such as gazebo's, bird tables etc.

In the last 6 months or so the market has been steady away, possible even slowing down slightly but i've seen business increase! The main reason is that people are starting to get sick of the cheap low quality imported items (especially furniture) and now choosing to pay that bit extra and have something that will last for years.

We're finding that a lot of retailers have people buying the same style of furniture (but slightly more expensive/better constructed) that they bought cheaply not long ago due to the original furniture failing due to crap materials etc.

Our current brochures & adverts make a big play on the fact that the furniture is manufactured in England and built to last. It seems to be working!

Gareth

The Zohan

That's got to be good news

Whilst price is an issue i do not buy based on that alone quality is a big factor for me.

Ray_li

Give it a few more years you won't be able to choose cuz it will all made abroad

Jonathan Davies

That depends on us consumers (to an extent at least). Price and value aren't the same... people are starting to see that about food, for example, already. I guess there'll always be some things that can't be sold at a quality premium, cars being one in my view.

scud8

iTrader: (1)

My parents had a similar business selling to the antique restoration trade - leather desktops, blotters, waste-paper bins, dummy book-backs etc. The business was started by my grandfather not long after the war and passed on. They had plenty of business coming in, but as you say it was hard work for not a lot of reward so they decided to jack the whole thing in a couple of years ago and move to Spain.

Gutmann pug

We still make the best Stairlifts in the world

speye91

i install the best stairlifts in the world

StickyMicky

nissan motors uk told the last company i worked for "johnsons controls" that they were looking at sites in Slovakia or some other random foreign place, and it would be a good idea if they did as well if they wanted to continue building the seats for them

while i was working for johnsons, i saw the sewing department get closed down and the jobs were all passed over to a cheaper Czech operation (the Czechs were already doing a bit of work for us anyway, including bringing the fabric over.

the main reason i got out of uk manufacturing as soon as something better came along, nissan in sunderland will go as soon as the government don't give them the massive grants that they require IMO

p1mark

I Work at Triumph Motorcycles-in the midlands not far from pugeot

When i started there 15 years ago there was about 30 of us, and we were not making any bikes. Just messing around tooling up and doing prototype and development.

Now there is about 900 people over 3 different sites. We make about a 1000 bikes a week.

In the UK market we consistently come in the top 3 sellers in the big bike sector. obviously we dont have that market share worldwide but we sell significant amounts to all corners of the globes, And we have at least 2 bikes that are generally acknowledged as being at the top of the class.

Production for 2007 MY will be 70,000 bikes so its still going up!

Trout

iTrader: (1)

I think we should go back to the dark satanic mills with rows and rows of clerks supporting even more endless rows of subsistence paid labourers on the production line with twelve year old children from the workshouse to do the less palatable jobs.

Or we could live in the real world of the 21st Century and accept the reality of living in and investing in the global economy.

Indeed we should welcome the pundit who only has made in Britain shoes, clothes, electronics, sports goods, kitchen goods, cars, houses, etc to throw the first stone!

Oh and by the way - as a country we are very good at precision manufacturing things such as the worlds's best hi fi, many of the world's best racing cars including F1 - these are large industries if not the scale of the darker days of the Industrial Revolution which are thankfully over.

Fuzz

My old company still making buildings out of steel, only trouble is the steel comes from Jamaica.

Andy