Malaysia's national carmaker once sold an Italian motorcycle maker for one euro
In July 2004 Malaysia's national carmaker Proton paid 70 million euros for a majority stake in the Italian motorcycle maker MV Agusta. Seventeen months later it handed the marque to Gevi for a single euro, and the buyer took on almost 140 million euros of debt along with it.
Proton had a habit of buying European names. On 30 October 1996 it took 80 percent of Lotus for 51 million pounds from a Luxembourg company controlled by Romano Artioli, then also the owner of Bugatti, and owned all of it by 2003. Lotus engineers tuned the suspension and handling of every Proton launched after 1996, helping sales of sporty models like the Satria GTi. In 2017 Proton's parent sold a 51 percent stake in Lotus and 49.9 percent of Proton itself to the Chinese group Geely.
The company began as a political project. The idea of a national car came in 1979 from Mahathir Mohamad, then deputy prime minister, and Proton was founded on 7 May 1983 with Mitsubishi as partner. Its name is a Malay backronym for National Automobile Enterprise. The first Saga was a reworked Mitsubishi Lancer Fiore with a 1.3-litre Mitsubishi engine, and the first one built in Shah Alam now sits in the National Museum. By mid-1986 it held 64 percent of the domestic market for cars below 1600cc, and demand outran supply.
For years almost every model borrowed Mitsubishi platforms and engines. The Waja of August 2000 was the first Proton designed in-house, making Malaysia the 11th country able to design a car from scratch, though its engine still came from Mitsubishi because Proton's own was not ready. It sold only moderately, and the smaller rival Perodua overtook Proton in sales in 2006.
Some milestones came later. The Preve, unveiled in April 2012, became the first Malaysian car awarded a full five-star rating by the Australasian safety programme ANCAP, the same year the conglomerate DRB-HICOM bought Proton outright.
Source: Proton Holdings
