Ladies and Gentlemen:
I am very pleased that my visit to Spain enables me to open this Exhibition of Computer-Aided Design and Computer-Aided Manufacturing Equipment, put on by Britain. We are very grateful to the Rector of the University for enabling us to have it in this distinguished University.
I have just recently had the pleasure of meeting the Rector and a number of Professors in the University and we have been talking about the important place of science in the future of all industry and commerce.
These days, so much more industry is knowledge-based and research-based than ever before. That is so not only in the great engineering, electronic, pharmaceutical and chemical industries; it is so in the traditional industries who, in order to be most competitive in manufacture, have to use all the latest electronic equipment and both aids to designing their product and aids to keeping control of stocks and aids to the manufacturing process.
We in Britain have specialised in this kind of equipment and in almost every industrial city to which I go, I will go and see a group of people concerned with computer-aided design and computer-aided manufacture. Both are extremely important. If you do not get the design right and attractive, there is not much point in getting the manufacturing right. Equally, there is no point in having the design right if you are not competitive in manufacture.
I have been preaching this message to our manufacturers and so, with the aid of universities—and it is vital that universities play a very important part with business—we have developed a range of equipment which we are selling the world over and we hope we shall be able to make quite good sales to Spain because we think it will help you a great deal.
It is my pleasure, therefore, to open this Exhibition of the kind of equipment which we have learned is of the best and which we have learned is most likely to help businesses, large and small, in other countries as well as our own.
May I take this opportunity of thanking you for the welcome and the hospitality you have extended to me and to say how very welcome people from your country are in mine and how very pleased we are at the cooperation in research and industry that is taking place between us.
It is now with great pleasure that I shall take these scissors and cut this blue ribbon formally to open the Exhibition.