Sep. 3--The Stock Exchange of Thailand will ask 16 brokerage firms to change their order transmission systems to help ease bottlenecks in the system.

The SET yesterday was forced to delay trading by one hour due to communications problems. Sixteen brokers using the same trading system were unable to process orders for Southern Steel under its original "2S" trading symbol in its debut on the MAI yesterday. Southern Steel later agreed to change its symbol to "S2" instead.

The pre-opening session began at 10.30, with trading in the morning running from 11 am to 12.30 pm. The afternoon session began normally with pre-opening at 2 pm and trading starting at 2.30 pm.

The Thailand Futures Exchange started gold futures trading normally, but delayed trade in equities-related derivatives until 10.45. The Bond Electronic Exchange opened trade normally.

Vichate Tantiwanich, a SET chief marketing officer, said it was the first time in decades that the exchange had been forced to delay the start of trade.

He said local brokers currently used two types of systems for transmitting orders to the exchange, Free View and DST. The SET wants the 16 brokers using DST to switch to the more popular Free View to help prevent future bottleneck problems.

"The problems yesterday also affected foreign trade. While the impact overall was relatively limited, in the long run, there could be an impact on market confidence," Mr Vichate said, adding that an investigation was pending on why communications links failed with brokers using the DST system.

The SET index closed yesterday at 654.12 points, unchanged from Tuesday, in trade worth 14.2 billion baht.

A directive to change IT systems could be costly for local brokers.

Chanachai Joonjiraporn, the chief executive of Globlex Securities, said a change in IT platforms could cost from 30 to 50 million baht, a costly expense under current circumstances for some brokers. Globlex recently completed a change from DST to Free View.

Mr Chanachai said the SET was also looking to upgrade its order system to increase processing speed to 25 orders per second from 20 now.

Other markets have already moved ahead to bolster their systems to accept up to 40 orders per second, he added.

Sadawut Taechaubol, the Country Group Securities executive chairman, said CGS now used DST but was in the process of changing to the faster and more efficient Free View.

"We plan to finish computer upgrading within next month. The cost for our IT system upgrade is around 70 million baht," he said.

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