Proton is dying and no one is buying over the company

Proton has been on the death bed for years and every time there is a potential saviour in sight the deal goes sour one way or another. Quite often the would be potential partner is a larger car foreign company looking to utilise Malaysia as a production base to capitalise on the Asean Free Trade Agreement and supply cars to other South East Asian countries such as Thailand, Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam and Singapore. During the initial talks everything looks positive until further investigation by the potential partner will uncover massive levels of corruption and other inadequacies.

Malaysia is in a strategic location to have a factory to manufacture or assemble cars to be supplied to neighbouring countries but Proton may not be the right partner. There are just too many 'devils' in the company that have been enjoying kick backs from suppliers for decades. This culture of corruption is so entrenched that it has been systematically destroying the company from inside. No business minded car company would accept this and if they were to partake in any joint venture these 'devils' would have to be removed from the company. However, so far Proton management has not been willing to remove these individual because many of them are in the management team.

VW had done their due diligence many years ago when they considered partnering with Proton but seeing this corruption based corporate culture VW didn't want anything to do with it. Now that Peugeot and Geely were considering to buy Proton, the deals have gone sour and Geely has backed out. It is very likely that upon discovering the levels of corruption and Proton's management's refusal to remove the corrupt members of the management Geely would not entertain working in such an environment. Peugeot is still in talks with Proton but it is also likely that they will back out too.

Proton will end up rotting and closing down before long since the Malaysian government no longer have the funds to bail out Proton after doing so numerous times. With each bail out or cash injection, nothing happened and the money just ended up in the pockets of a select few.

Without further investment or securing a joint venture partner or a buy out, Proton will not survive another 10 years. Their stock levels are extremely high since many people refuse to buy their cars and the operational costs are killing the company. The new models with higher margins are no popular. Only the basic Saga model is selling but that model alone is not sufficient to keep the company afloat.