Proton: The Perfect Basket Case Study

Yesterday, the Star had a surprisingly interesting and candid article on Proton, our favourite national car. Despite the very heavy editing (methink, since some of the paragraphs read so very weird), the piece retained some crucial points that reflected the dismal state that is our national automotive industry. Read it here.

Excerpts:

Proton saga continues

…As consumers, all the ordinary Malaysians want is a car of reasonable quality at a reasonable price. Ordinary Malaysians have been massively subsidising Proton and at the end, we still have a company that simply cannot compete against anyone in the world.

An Australian fresh graduate can earn A$2,000-A$3,000 per month and drive a brand new Toyota Camry for A$33,000. A Malaysian fresh graduate earns RM2,000-RM3,000 per month and has to make do with a discounted Proton Saga…

…

Proton has tried for more than two decades and failed and will fail again if the right things are not done… How can we make Proton globally competitive?

Will the local party have the skills, resources, management, alliances, experience, technologies and a huge host of other critical assets to turn Proton around (Elanor: just in case, this is a rhetorical question)? Or will it come in and give us a lifetime guarantee that millions of ordinary Malaysians will have to keep subsidising it?

…

… [T]he whole country and its future are being held ransom to parties that do not bother to explain to Malaysians why there is another missed deadline…

…

In the first place, should we [even] have a national car (Elanor: again, rhetorical…)? …

Well, not everything is lost – at least now researchers have a perfect natural experiment for an industry-wide economy-wide market failure, with the guinea pigs being 27 millions ordinary Malaysians (suckers) versus a network of 250 thousands politically connected and extremely inefficient auto-players.

Elanor