"There are always two sides of story".
This is practically true to the recent corporate scene in Malaysia. Where MAS and Proton are the hot topics in town. People are talking the huge losses in their financial books.
One side of story, MAS is claiming that the hike of oil price causing the shrink of its revenue. The other side of story, Air Asia is giving millions of free tickets to the lucky one. While Proton is having the controvesy of the 1-Euro sales of Agusta, the waiting period for Perodua Myvi is 1 year due to the huge demand from the public.
In many people eyes, MAS and Proton are the spoilt kids. Whenever they loss money, they cry to their parent and ask for even more money, and they spend the money in expensive toys. In order to bring the 2 companies out from trouble and continue to survive in the competitive environment, the managements have to control the costs and try to think out of the box.
Stop the financial assistance from the government will help the 2 GLC companies to grow stronger. It is a tendency that if there is a subsidy given to a company, the company will not take any effective measure to control its costs. Management guru Michael Porter says that one way to stay in the competitive business world is to keep up the cost leadership and try to be differentiated.
No doubt that MAS and Air Asia are having different types of business model. But this does not mean that MAS should operate at high cost. By hiring an experienced person from oil industry, to go into fuel hedging is one of the means to control the cost. MAS must do more than that. The cost can be controlled by reducing the spending on the unnecessary, the fringe benefits for managers. Perhaps, by slimming down the management size would be a feasible option too. Increasing the fare prices is a temporarily solution, this will not ensure MAS's financial figures go back to black if MAS still continue runs on high operation cost. There is not wrong to hire expatriate from other airlines company, but the most important thing is to give substantial authority and free hand should be given to them in order to implement radical changes. Bear in mind that MAS is still facing strong competitors from Cathay Pacific and SIA in this region.
Proton has been in the automobile industry for 20 years. Some of its car model are almost 20 years old and you still can see them in showrooms. The introduction of new car model is slow as compare to its competitors. This is possibly that Proton cannot keep the production cost low. If the sales of the car can cover its cost, Proton should move on to produce another models. Unfortunately, they have been in the industry for 20 years, they can only produce sedan cars. When there are high demand in SUV and MPV, there is nothing from Proton can offer to the market.
There are many people placing their orders for Myvi and the waiting period is now more than 8 months to one year. With my unpleasant experience with Perodua over my order of Myvi, later I find out that there are many unhappy people have cancelled their orders for Myvi. However, I don't see any aggressive action taken by Proton to tap into this group of car buyers. Proton has launched Savvy and another model of Gen-2, but sadly to hear that their sales cannot compete to Myvi. It may be the people perception on Proton's quality, however, this is up to Proton to change the market perception. Besides advertising the high quality of its new car, quick delivery is another good selling point too.
It's time for Proton to think out of the box in order to get back the customers. A massive re-branding exercise for Proton is highly and urgently required. The problem in Proton is that the company always takes the local car buyers for granted. I believe many of us still can recall the arrogance of the salesmen back in the years before 1997. We had to wait for 1 year to get car from Proton. The salesmen spoke the same tone: "if you cannot wait, go and buy other cars!".
The golden day for MAS and Proton is gone, the customers are financially sounded and they have more choices now. Putting all political issues aside. Get down to the serious business.
