After months of leading a number of well established public relation firms on a ‘wild goose chase’ chasing for the yearly public relations contract for Proton Cars, Proton has decided to boost up their own in house Public Relations team (who have been having a good run with 98% of the Malaysian media falling in love back with the Proton brand) by hiring veteran PR maestro, Vijayaratnam Tharumartnam (his first task would probably be to tackle the remaining 2% that do not want to bow down to Proton’s rebirth under Chinese car giant, Zhejiang Geely Holding Group).
Vijayaratnam is no newbie to the Malaysian automotive industry having done a 6-year long stint in BMW Malaysia when it first opened office in Cyberjaya in 2004 where he started the corporate communications division and gave ‘birth’ to the famous BMW Shorties program in 2007 with 10 aspiring Malaysian filmmakers (the program is still running successfully till today). Vijayaratnam is also credited to expanding the BMW brand awareness across all media channels in Malaysia at the time.
Vijayaratnam brings years of extensive in-house and agency communications experience in government, corporate, and consumer sectors to the business. In his previous capacity, he was the vice president of corporate communications at Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC).
His previous experience also includes the role of vice president of communications at HSBC Global Resources (UK) and also managing consultant for Text100 Malaysia.
Let’s see if Vijayaratnam’s ‘magic wand’ still has some sparkle left in it.
By the way, Vijayaratnam Tharumartnam has been in Singapore for the past 4 years and 5 months as a freelance consultant.
Main Picture Credit: Faisal Shah
