HO CHI MINH CITY -- Vietnam's biggest stock exchange said it will suspend trading again Wednesday as it continues to fix a system malfunction, extending an outage that began Monday.
The latest announcement from the Ho Chi Minh City Stock Exchange said more time was needed to test the system with securities companies before resuming normal operation. No mention was made of whether trading would resume Thursday.
Tran Van Dung, chairman of Vietnam's State Securities Commission, had told reporters earlier said Vietnamese technical experts, as well as specialists from Thailand's stock exchange, were investigating the cause of the outage and working to resolve the problem. Dung said that the system trouble was almost fixed and that trading was expected to resume on Wednesday.
The securities commission chief encouraged investors to remain calm and take an objective view of the market.
The technical problem occurred in Monday's closing session when orders could not be matched. All closing prices and indexes of the session failed to register. The Ho Chi Minh City Stock Exchange did not resume trading through Tuesday.
The main cause of the problem was errors in order-matching software, not outside attacks or an overload, a representative at the stock exchange said on Tuesday.
This is the first failure at the bourse since 2008, when it halted trading for three straight days owing to a technical trouble.
The stock exchange launched trading in 2000. Located in Vietnam's commercial hub, it is the country's largest bourse, along with the Hanoi Stock Exchange, with which it is expected to merge. It has averaged $319 million worth of trading each session over the past month, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The total market cap of Ho Chi Minh-listed stocks listed is more than $100 billion.
Blue chips including Vietnam Dairy Products, Petrovietnam Gas, Saigon Beer Alcohol Beverage, Vingroup, Vietjet and Commercial Bank for Foreign Trade of Vietnam are among more than the 400 companies that trade on the exchange.
(Nikkei)
