Go for 500,000, Proton told

JOHOR BARU: Proton has been mandated to raise its annual production to 500,000 units in five years by its parent DRB-Hicom Bhd.

“Moving forward, it is going to be challenging, and it will be difficult. Competition is going to get harder and tougher, cost will be higher and this also applies to Proton,” said DRB-Hicom managing director Datuk Seri Mohd Khamil Jamil.

Currently, Proton manufactures about 150,000 units of cars annually, and is placed second based on annual car sales.

He said the company was looking to build that volume from the export market, and deemed it fundamental to the survival and growth of Proton.

Proton's main plant in Tanjung Malim.

According to him, there must be a concerted plan for the export of vehicles, as the numbers currently were disappointing, with Proton distributing cars to 55 countries but just with a volume of 20,000.

“To make 500,000 cars is one thing, to sell 500,000 is another. Everyone has been asking me about plans for Proton, but a company with 27 years of history cannot be changed within six months or one year,” he said.

He said the first export market that Proton was focusing on was Australia, due to the positive prospects of selling Proton cars there.

“The positioning of the cars is important. At present, Proton is sold overseas as a cheap car, but to me, we can look into the markets where we can actually sell them based on quality, safety and branding. The second market we are penetrating is Thailand with the Exora, and the third market is Indonesia. With a population of 280 million, the multi-purpose vehicle market is great. Our priorities need to be on the right course from now on,” he said.

“We cannot share in detail our plans but we can give glimpses of what we are going to do, and there will be a couple of models that we are going to introduce into the market over the next five years,” he said.

On the local front, he said Proton would also look into opportunities to seek representation in all the car segments that were available in Malaysia.

“The main market we are missing out on is the A and compact segment, and moving forward, we will be in the entire range of the car segment,” he said.

In a surprising statement, Khamil also revealed that the Lotus five-year five-car plan was actually scrapped even before DRB-Hicom acquired the national carmaker. It was assumed all along that DRB-Hicom was the one putting a stop to the original plan.

On Lotus, he said Proton was currently talking to the consortium of bankers to release the remainder of the £270mil syndicated loan given to the UK-based carmaker.

“We have come up with a financing plan for Proton, and we have presented our plan for Lotus. This is the interim until such time that we can turn around Lotus. I'm not saying profitable but to be sustainable,” he said.

Todate, he said Proton had invested about £100mil in Lotus, and the showroom launched last week was just the beginning of more activities to increase the presence of the Lotus brand in Malaysia.

He said there would be a few more models to excite the market and there would not be any capacity expansion for now as the Norfolk plant was capable of producing 8,000 units while the company was just churning out 2,000 units currently.

The new Lotus flagship showroom that was opened in Kuala Lumpur last week. The blue car is 
the RM332,000 Lotus Elise, one of two new models launched at the same time as the showroom 
opening. The other new model is the Exige S, priced from