The good news is – ONLY the UK is still in trouble!
18 November 2009
Great news – in all but a couple of countries the recession is over and the recovery is on! Hurrah!
For electronics, as a truly global industry, this has to be both a relief and just the spark we all needed to get the spring back in our collective step.
This silver lining has, as we know, a massive black cloud attached to it and that is that one of those two countries still in recession is us in the UK (the other is Spain with a crisis in its construction industy). While I am not in the habit of putting on Land of Hope and Glory in the background while contemplating our rich heritage of inventing so much that is deemed of value to the human race, my initial reaction to hearing the news was that of disappointment. Bordering on the depressing in fact.
There is no point in reeling off a list of Britain’s contributions to the modern world, most of them are well known and it is irrelevant to our current circumstances anyway. What is important is what happens now. And what is NOT happening now in the UK is enough manufacturing. The reason, as we all know, that the UK has been hit so hard by this recession is because we have such a ‘strong’ financial services sector (about 32% of GDP), the largest contributor to our economy by a considerable margin. (Interesting use of the word ‘strong’ in that last sentence).
Compare this to the whole manufacturing sector that is responsible for nearer 12% of GDP and you begin to see why we continue to struggle. While America, Japan, Germany, France and the rest are managing to latch on to weak, but growing, consumer demand by manufacturing their way out of recession, the UK has proved to have insufficent foundations in the manufacturing sector to do likewise. This is not a new subject for me in this column and I will refrain from covering too much old ground – so I will shift away from the dark cloud and back to the silver lining.
Firstly, the period in question when some economies were starting to emerge from recession is already a few months in the past. If we are looking at our economy and how it affects us, rather than getting patriotically competitive about it, we can probably say that if the economy shrank by 0.4% in July to September, and the trend is upwards, then we were probably back into positive growth by the end of that quarter. Even if we weren’t by then we should be pretty confident that we are now.
More importantly, the positive news from around the world is what really matters to engineers in the electronics industry. And in the UK (time to put Land of Hope and Glory back on) we can still boast a reputation and capability in design electronics that rightly gives us a seat on the world’s top table. As long as there is demand globally, electronics design in the UK will benefit.
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