Articles
Your new book, The New Industrial Revolution, is timely, with the recent rebirth of interest in manufacturing. What got you interested in the subject? It’s an unusual topic for an Financial Times journalist to specialise in.
I worked at the FT for 29 years and came on to the newspaper with an interest in technology because I had a degree in chemistry. And I had worked for New Scientist beforehand. Naturally I gravitated toward technology. It wasn’t that much of a leap to make the move into manufacturing, which is all about applying technology. And, to be fair, the FT always had an interest in making things. The editor at the time I joined, Geoffrey Owen, was in fact a zealot for manufacturing. But there weren’t that many people who knew about chemistry. That was unusual.
You held several roles at the newspaper. You were chemical industry correspondent before widening your remit into economics, settling on engineering, and then becoming manufacturing editor. How did that happen?
I wasn’t exactly told to do it. I developed that brief myself, really, and as long as I was writing stories that people found interesting, my colleagues said fine – you do it.
You have an encyclopaedic knowledge of making things through history, which runs through the book. What excites you about manufacturing?
You have only a certain number of elements in the periodic table, so there is something beguiling about the idea that you can construct billions of products. There is the ingenuity to make things from all these materials that surround us. But I would never have been able to find out what I know about manufacturing if I had not worked for the FT and had the chance to travel all over the world, talking to thousands of people. The book would not have been possible.
It sometimes frustrates engineers that there is so little coverage of manufacturing in the mainstream media, unless there is a plant closure or other horror story, for example. Do you share that frustration?
Uncovering these stories is hard, and making them readable is also hard. The book and the stories in it took a lot of time for me to uncover. Sometimes, even at the FT, which lives and breathes being interested in business, I would have to search for hours for an angle. And if you go to a newspaper that is less specialised, you’ve got an even tougher problem. I don’t find it that surprising.
We have looked at additive layer manufacturing (ALM) as a technology of the future in PE in recent months. Are there any other technologies going forward that you see as promising?
3D printing is interesting, but it’s part of a panoply of tools that people can use. I’ve
been more excited at points by multi-axis machine tools: a manufacturing process analogous to the precision of surgery on a person, arguably more exciting than ALM machines, which work in an easy-to-understand way and are slow. But 3D printing is good because it attracts interest in manufacturing among people who might not otherwise be keen, such as youngsters.
Surely there would have been less rhetoric over manufacturing’s importance from the government at the start of your career than there is now?
You don’t necessarily have to put it on a pedestal above everything else. Manufacturing used to be a bigger part of what Britain did. But in the wake of the financial crisis, people realised it could do more for the economy. There’s more of a reason to be interested, but it wouldn’t be there without the economic collapse. There was a fixation on the services sector driving growth, and politicians – quite rightly – began to think: “have we gone a bit too far?” But it’s not up to me to start banging a drum, saying we should resurrect the economy around the manufacturing sector. We would, however, be better off if we had double the number of very large companies operating in Britain that we could identify as proper manufacturers.
Should one of the government’s aspirations be for manufacturing’s share of GDP to grow?
It’s about 10% now. You might say that if it were 12% in a few years’ time, that would be good. But there are misunderstandings around this. For example, the cost of electronics in some manufactured goods now is many thousandths less than the equivalent cost in the middle of the last century. Relative to the rest of the economy, manufacturing experiences deflation in terms of prices. The fact that prices have gone down means the amount of money you get from a certain level of manufacturing output is always going to go down. Therefore for manufacturing to constitute a greater share of GDP, its rate of growth in terms of current prices would have to be enormous. Aspirations toward 15% are practically impossible – so I don’t think there’s much point in setting a figure.
What strategies should British engineering firms adopt in the future?
Play to your strengths. Lord Kumar Bhattacharyya said to me some time ago, but I think it holds true today, that there were three things manufacturers needed to do: employ talented people; learn to transfer technology – not necessarily even develop wonderful technology, but understand it or get it from other people; and think in global terms. That’s not just about exploiting markets elsewhere, but more about seeing what is going on in the world. There may be opportunities.