Answer to Question #314481 in Microeconomics for lim

Question

Explain the background of Proton and Honda

Answer 1

Proton Holdings Berhad (PHB; informally Proton) is a Malaysian automotive company and automobile corporation active in automobile design, manufacturing, distribution, and sales. Proton was established in 1985 as Malaysia's sole national badged car company until the advent of Perodua in 1993. The company is headquartered in Shah Alam, Selangor, and operates additional facilities at Proton City, Perak. 'Proton' is a Malay acronym for Perusahaan Otomobil Nasional (National Automobile Company).

Proton was originally a manufacturer of rebadged versions of Mitsubishi Motors (MMC) products in the 1980s and 1990s. Proton produced its first indigenously designed (though Mitsubishi-engined), non-badge engineered car in the year 2000 and elevated Malaysia as the 11th country in the world with the capability to design cars from the ground up.^[4] Since the 2000s, Proton has produced a mix of locally engineered and badge-engineered vehicles. Proton cars are currently sold in at least 15 countries, the majority of which are in Asia; its largest export market was the United Kingdom, where its cars were sold until 2016.

Proton was originally owned in majority by HICOM, with minority stakes being held by Mitsubishi Group members. By 2005, Mitsubishi had divested their stake in Proton to Khazanah Nasional, and in 2012, Proton was fully acquired by DRB-HICOM. Proton was the owner of Lotus Cars from 1996 to 2017. In May 2017, DRB-HICOM announced plans to sell a 49.9% stake in Proton and a 51% stake in Lotus to Geely Automobile Holdings. The deal was signed in June 2017, and since then, Lotus ceased to be a unit of Proton.

Honda:

Motorcycle builder Soichiro Honda incorporates the Honda Motor Company in Hamamatsu, Japan. In the 1960s, the company achieved worldwide fame for its motorcycles (in particular, its C100 Super Cub, which became the world’s best-selling vehicle); in the 1970s, it achieved worldwide fame for its affordable, fuel-efficient cars. Today, in large part because of its continued emphasis on affordability, efficiency, and eco-friendliness (its internal motto is “Blue skies for our children”), the company is doing better than most.

Before he founded the company that bore his name, Soichiro Honda was a drifter and a dreamer. He bounced from one mechanic’s job to another, and also worked as a babysitter, a race car driver, and an amateur distiller. Even his wife said he was a “wizard at hardly working.” In 1946, he took over an old factory that lay mostly in ruins from wartime bombings, though he did not have much of a plan for what he would do there. First, he tried building what he called a “rotary weaving machine”; next he tried to mass-produce frosted glass windows, then woven bamboo roof panels. Finally, after he came across a cache of surplus two-stroke motors, he had an idea: motorbikes.