What does a workable industrial strategy for industry look like?
What are manufacturers’ hoping to achieve in their businesses, how will they go about delivering these ambitions and where can a new industrial strategy play a strong supporting role in sustaining growth across the economy – these are some of the questions that our latest report, in partnership with NatWest – is seeking to answer.
We’ve been talking about industrial strategy and its components for ages (see here, here, here and here...). In preparation for a big post-referendum push – regardless of the outcome – we asked manufacturers before the vote about their ambitions to help focus minds on what the priority actions should be on the domestic policy front.
And this is what we found…
1. Ambition – there’s a lot of it about
Pre-referendum over three-quarters of the manufacturers we surveyed were planning for growth over their business plan (and yes, manufacturers have these, with 71% looking at setting strategies for the next three to five years) and a third of those were shooting for substantial growth.
2. The importance of productivity is not lost on industry
But growth in what? It’s not just economists and politicians that have been pre-occupied with productivity, the need to squeeze out on-going improvements in productivity is high on industry’s agenda with almost two-thirds having an explicit productivity goal in their growth plans. It’s about profits too, of course, and even as manufactures have seen sales growth, they’ve struggled with improvements in margins – a situation 70% are looking to reverse in the next few years.