Manchester Airport’s Meet The Buyers: Connecting SMEs with aviation industry

Representatives from more than 270 small and medium sized businesses attended Manchester Airport’s annual ‘Meet The Buyers’ exhibition at the Runway Visitor Park yesterday, taking the opportunity to meet face-to-face with procurement teams from 28 major players in the aviation and hospitality industries.

Around 800 pre-arranged face-to-face appointments took place across the course of the day, with a schedule of presentations, workshops and networking events offering businesses further opportunities to connect.

The programme included a workshop on how to successfully secure contracts through effective bidding and tendering, a talk from Manchester City Council on inclusive growth and social value, and Manchester Airport Skills Hub also ran a session looking in-depth at how businesses can futureproof themselves by upskilling their workforce.

More than £25m of deals were struck at last year’s Meet The Buyers event, and this year’s attendees were delighted with the opportunity to explore opportunities with major buyers face-to-face.

Lisa Carrington is Business Development Manager at Spacemann, a company that supplies booths, pods and private working spaces. She said her business was new to the aviation sector and her attendance at the event was part of a fact-finding mission, looking at ways their products could be implemented in an airport setting. She said:

“It’s been really interesting to get some time, one-on-one, with buyers. Mostly I’m here to understand how we get involved in the aviation network, so it’s good to manage putting questions to people who are experts in their field.”

For Neil Whittingham, a Technical Sales Manager at Liverpool-based Ventilux UK Ltd, this was not his first Meet The Buyers event, having attended two previously.

His company, which supplies emergency lighting products like exit signs and escape route luminaires as well as light testing systems, had already supplied some projects at Manchester Airport and viewed the event as an opportunity to expand its profile in the aviation sector.

Neil explained:

“The event is a great way to continue to develop relationships with existing customers but also try to find new customers, in or around the airport and in the wider region. It’s the best of both worlds in that sense.”

Among the 28 major buyers represented at the event was AmcoGiffen, the Barnsley-headquartered construction firm which has played a key role in Manchester Airport’s £1.3bn transformation of Terminal 2. They met dozens of prospective suppliers across the event. This was their fourth successive year at Meet The Buyers, and Contracts Manager Phil Brown has attended all of them. He said:

“We’ve worked with Manchester Airports Group for many years, and have built a lot of important relationships with North West based businesses through the projects we’ve worked on. This is an event that we keep coming back to because it’s an invaluable networking opportunity.”

AmcoGiffen’s Procurement Manager Joe Jagger added:

“Some of our work is quite niche and specialist, so a face-to-face conversation with potential suppliers gives us the chance to get into the detail of what we need and gives them the chance to put forward their offering and we can see if we’re missing something.”

Marcella M’Rabety, Head of Social Sustainability at Manchester Airport, said:

“We take pride in our role in connecting people across the North with the places they want to fly to, but we also take our responsibilities very seriously as a major employer and economic driver in the region. The airport directly employs more than 3,400 people and indirectly supports almost 20,000 jobs – adding billions of pounds in value to the regional economy in partnership with the businesses that operate on our site, ranging from hotels and restaurants to airlines and aviation service companies.

“Our position at the heart of all that makes us uniquely placed to run an event such as Meet The Buyers, where we are able to give SMEs in our region the chance to meet with procurement teams at some of the biggest names in our industry and explore the opportunities available to work together, to the benefit of the wider North.”