Does this mean Geely will abandon its EV project with Proton for this?

By now we should all know that Chinese automaker, Geely, is a partner to our first national carmaker, Proton and is responsible for the brand’s three most popular SUVs, the X50, X70 and X90, which are all basically just rebadged Geely SUVs with a few Malaysian tweaks.

Now, we get some drama in this partnership as Indonesia has asked Geely to help the country build a homegrown electric vehicle (EV) by 2025 or 2026. This was confirmed by an Indonesian senior minister not too long ago. The real kicker is that this same minister stated that Geely had agreed.

Moreover, Minister Luhut Pandjaitan, who oversees regulations on natural resources and investment, said at a seminar, “I have offered Geely, do you want to make cars in Indonesia, but be an Indonesian brand and do the research in Indonesia? They said yes.”

The offer would be packaged with Indonesia supplying nickel ore to produce EV batteries, but the research must be led by Indonesia, he said. So does this mean Geely is completely abandoning the idea of a Malaysian developed EV with Proton? Well, after all these years of research and nothing to show for it, I can’t blame Geely.

Indonesia has been trying to court EV makers to invest in the country, offering access to its rich nickel reserves, a key component of EV batteries. But it has had mixed success so far. Indonesia’s efforts to win investment from U.S EV maker, Tesla and China’s BYD, two of the world’s biggest EV makers, have yet to invest.

On top of that, a few days ago, Vietnamese EV company VinFast said it plans to invest around USD1.2 billion (about RM 5,619,273,340) in Indonesia in the long term, including for a plant that is targeted to start production in 2026. This means essentially that Indonesia will build its own EV before we do.

Last month, Southeast Asia’s largest economy saw investment commitments in EV production by China’s Hozon New Energy Automobile and Japan’s Mitsubishi Motors. This is all well and good for Indonesia but if Geely also decides to invest more in Indonesia, it will be forced to invest less in Malaysia.

Geely has undoubtedly pulled Proton out of a very dark place as the brand was seeing a lot of losses and debt before Geely showed up and basically just solved all their problems for them. Sometimes we all need a helping hand but I fear that Proton may be too dependent on Geely at the moment so what happens if Geely abandons Proton?

We got all this from Reuters and their full article is linked here. Thank you Reuters for the information and images.