Weak pound is ?good for UK manufacturing?

The recession and the resulting devaluation of the pound has provided an unexpected boon for UK manufacturers.

According to a report penned by the managing director of market analysts Deloitte, Roger Bootle in the Telegraph, manufacturing still accounts for 12 per cent of the UK economy – three per cent more than the financial services sector – and the UK is the world’s sixth largest producer of manufactured goods.

“Since about 45pc of all of UK manufactured goods are exported, the pound is critical,” said Bootle. “For more than a decade it was much too high. It now looks to be at a competitive level. This means that producing UK goods for export, and to replace imports, is more profitable than it has been since the period after we came out of the ERM in the early 1990s.”