The British Motor Corporation Limited (BMC) was a UK-based vehicle manufacturer formed in early 1952 to give effect to an agreed merger of the Morris and Austin businesses.

Morris Motors, the holding company of the productive businesses of the Nuffield Organization, owned MG, Riley, and Wolseley.

The Longbridge plant was up to date, having been thoroughly modernised in 1951, and compared very favourably to Nuffield's 16 different and often old-fashioned factories scattered over the Midlands.

The biggest-selling car, the Mini, was famously analysed by Ford Motor Company, which concluded that BMC must have been losing £30 on every one sold.

The result was that although volumes held up well throughout the BMC era, market share fell as did profitability and hence investment in new models, triggering the 1966 merger with Jaguar Cars to form British Motor Holdings (BMH), and the government-sponsored merger of BMH with Leyland Motor Corporation in 1968.

Styling was also getting distinctly old-fashioned and this caused Leonard Lord, in an unusual move for him, to call upon the services of an external stylist.

As well as the car manufacturing arms, the company had its own printing and publishing firm, the Nuffield Press, inherited from the Morris Motors group.

III, and Morris Oxford V. Later, the design was licensed in Argentina and produced as the Siam Di Tella 1500, Traveller station wagon and Argenta pick-up.

In the postwar period, the Danish government closely regulated exports and imports to maintain the country's balance of trade.

From 1963 to 1975, a company was established in Spain to produce BMC cars under licence, its name was: 'AUTHI' -'Automoviles de Turismo Hispano-Ingleses' -'Spanish-English Tourism Automobiles'.

[12] On 14 December 1966 BMC shareholders approved the change of its name to British Motor Holdings (BMH) and it took effect from that date.

This basic structure remained in place right up until the creation of the Austin Rover Group in the early 1980s, by which time BLMC had been nationalised and renamed British Leyland Limited[14] (later just BL plc), although by this time both Jaguar and Land Rover had been placed in their own independent subsidiaries which were separate from the old BMC/LMC divisions.

Following the merger with Leyland, a review of company records undertaken with the support of the new board, author Graham Turner stated that at the time of the merger, 16 versions of the Mini were being produced, yielding an average profit of just £16 per car, while every Morris Minor sold lost the group £9 and every Austin Westminster sold lost £17.

Even the UK's best seller, the Austin/Morris 1100, had to be subjected to an emergency cost-reduction programme which removed about £10 from the cost of each car, applying changes that included the omission of lead sealing from body joints (£2.40 per car), removing provision for optional reversing lamps (£0.10) and "changes in body finish" (£0.75).

[15] Because of the high proportion of auto-production costs represented by fixed costs that needed to be allocated over a planned production volume, and the use in the 1960s of investment appraisal criteria that were ill-suited to accounting for volume fluctuations and the rapidly changing value of the UK currency in the 1960s, the precise figures quoted may be open to challenge, but the new management's diagnosis that BMC's profitability was insufficient to fund support and new model investment to cover its disparate range of brands and models was hard to refute.

[citation needed] Throughout the 1960s, the failure of the United Kingdom to join the European Economic Community meant that the company could not exploit the lucrative European markets due to high import tariffs, whereas BMC's key rivals Ford and General Motors both had German subsidiaries producing and selling within the bloc, and were therefore immune from those import tariffs.