I recently attended Mazda's largest showroom in Southeast Asia launch in Glenmarie, Shah Alam over at Malaysia. An impressive building that consists of two levels of car display, a workshop and office space sprawled over four floors totaling 130,000 square feet.

This shows commitment from Mazda's local partners Bermaz Motor Sdn Bhd as well as Mazda's commitment in the region.

Anyway, aside from the free flow of food as well as feasting on the eye candy present, I was there to see what's new with the Zoom Zoom brand. This was actually quite easy to do as the President/CEO of Mazda himself was present for the launch.

Mr Takeshi Yamanouchi (pictured below), the President and CEO of Mazda Corporation had flown in from Japan to launch the multi-million Ringgit facility. He mentioned in his opening that whilst Mazda had suffered from long economic slump in U.S. and Europe and the very strong Yen, they are now aimed at turning around their business by achieving 1.7 million global sales and operating profits 150 billion Yen by 2016.

They have also targeted a sales total of around 150,000 units, triple the current sales volume for ASEAN market by 2015. Then later at the press conference he went on the ask questions from the floor and we get to hear what he has in store for Mazda in the near future.

Firstly, Mazda is totally putting their weight behind their SkyActiv technology that is now being seen in the latest Mazda CX-5. In an era where other car manufacturers are building hybrids, Mazda feels that they basically needed to focus on the basics