UK overtakes France to become 8th largest manufacturer

> While Make UK regards the rise in the export rankings as “encouraging”, it cautions that this is only the third time since 2002 that the UK has been ranked higher than France and cannot be attributed to a post-Brexit bounce or other specific factors.

Sounds like it is just complex models for each country with significant sources of error so one year is only really a good indicator that the UK probably hasn't slipped.

Why not? iPhone assembling in China is still called manufacturing after all. Nothing wrong with that. In fact, future manufacturing will probably be about assembling components but customized to individual customers from prebuilt components.