Moglix, a leading Indian procurement platform company, is at the forefront of the global battle to get internationally sourced supplies to front line health and care workers fighting Covid 19. The company has recently started operations in the UK and has become the latest company to join the Industry Forum.

The tsunami of demand for medical supplies unleashed by the pandemic threatens long established supply sources and channels that are now struggling to cope. The world has sufficient manufacturing capacity and capability to rise to this challenge, provided that people and logistics systems can adapt quickly. Existing suppliers need to be connected to new customers and new market entrants need to be connected to customers whose needs have outgrown their usual suppliers.

Rahul Garg, the founder of Moglix, recently took time out to discuss with Rod Dowler key questions about using the Moglix platform to procure PPE supplies to to combat Covid 19

Q1: Rahul, how does a UK company such as a care home with urgent needs for PPE supplies contact a company like Moglix.

A: Any company urgently needing quality PPE supplies can reach out through our website : https://www.moglix.com/covid-19-essentials or by sending us an email on covid@moglix.com. We can provide PPEs such as masks, gloves, goggles, coveralls, face shield, etc. across the UK.

Q2: There have been press stories about testing kits delivered from Asia not working. How can this be avoided?

A: These are challenging times and spurious supplies are coming on to the market. However, it is not advisable to consider all supplies from Asian countries to be defective. The best way to avoid this is to work with a credible platform who can directly source from the brands, verify that they have the right quality checks and safety procedures in place to ensure that only certified PPEs are supplied. Moglix has shipped over 2 million PPE items across the UK and Europe in the past 2 months.

Q3: In the current competitive market, is it possible to make sure that prices charged are the best available?

A: Well we are seeing that the prices are dynamic. As the supply chains are disrupted, manufacturers and suppliers are trying to align alternate logistics for the deliveries. Given this situation most people are focusing on availability and quality rather than price. We have also seen that the established brands and marketplaces are charging fair prices to ensure demand and supply are matched. These are unprecedented times and normal market dynamics are disrupted. Usually Moglix is able to provide the most competitive price in the market since we have category experts in our team and access to a global supply chain network.

More about Moglix can be found at https://business.moglix.com/ Enquiries for UK deliveries and UK sourced supplies can be sent to anil.kalkaria@moglix.com

Industry Forum's Chief Economic Adviser, Andrew Smith, kicks-off the new year with his thoughts on the economic outlook for 2020.

UK Economic Outlook

The UK is performing badly. The economy has been slowing since 2017 and pretty much ground to a halt at the turn of the year, leaving growth over 2019 as a whole around only 1%. The good news for 2020 is that few economists expect much further deterioration; the bad news is few expect much of an improvement either.

While this poor performance is partly due to the effect on UK exports of a slowing world economy - reflecting escalating trade protectionism and tighter financial conditions - the collapse of business investment following the EU referendum is hardly coincidental. In the last 18 months, the proportion of companies citing Brexit uncertainty as an important factor affecting their business has risen sharply to more than half, and the performance gap between the UK and comparable economies has widened.

December’s general election has removed some of this uncertainty, notably there is now a government with a working majority ensuring the UK’s formal withdrawal from the EU. But the crucial questions remain unanswered. When will we actually part company? Will it be with or without a trade agreement and what sort?  If maintained, the Prime Minister’s insistence that a deal must be struck by the end of this year will at best severely limit its scope, and at worst create new cliff-edge no-deal risk.

Amongst the more optimistic forecasters, the Bank of England assumes there will be “a smooth path” to “a deep free trade agreement with the EU”, but still sees only a gradual pickup with growth not returning to 2% until 2022, predicated on a rebound in business investment.

However, even those who doubt the smoothness of the path to, and depth of, any FTA are not – for now - forecasting outright recession either, given the resilience of the labour market. Record high employment and record low unemployment should see real earnings continue to recover (and finally return to their 2007 peak!), underpinning consumer spending (which accounts for two-thirds of total demand) and thus GDP growth – unless there is a major shock to confidence.

Of course, the flip side of strong jobs growth has been stagnating productivity as companies have preferred to employ more workers as demand has risen, rather than invest in (labour-saving) new capacity. But, with the economy now around full-employment and immigration likely to be politically constrained, we are rapidly running out of this particular road. If the UK is to return to anything like the long-term growth rate of 2-2½% pre-financial crisis - which accommodated rising living standards and public service improvements - a pre-requisite is the favourable resolution of this so-called “productivity puzzle”.

It is against this background that the March Budget will try to reconcile high expectations on the back of pre-election promises with the reality of a weak economy and limited room for manoeuvre under the government’s fiscal rules. Amongst competing priorities – “levelling up” the regions, social care, health, education, tax cuts and fiscal prudence – something has to give. No-one knows which way the Prime Minister will jump – and I suspect he doesn’t either.

Andrew Smith

Chief Economic Adviser, Industry Forum

January, 2020

The dice are loaded in the game to survive global heating. We need a radical plan to win, write Klaudia Chmielowska and Rod Dowler.

Open article

Sigmund Freud, the public affairs industry and the internet may all have played a part in declining levels of public trust, write Isabelle Stanley and Rod Dowler. Measures to restore trust could include independent media fact-checking and research and greater transparency in political donations.

Open article

Klaudia Chmielowska has produced this opinion piece summarising the output from a student project at the Industry Forum, a London think tank focused on dialogue between public policy makers and business. She is a second-year undergraduate student reading Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the University of Oxford, a British Alumni Society scholar, and an HSBC scholar. In previous projects, she has used quantitative methods and market research to produce a strategic analysis for a network of women micro-entrepreneurs in securing the financing they need to deliver clean energy products to households in rural Nigeria.

Open a copy of Brexit and UK higher education - turning a challenge into an opportunity