JOIN USFujitsu still probing causes of Tokyo stock exchange glitch
Fujitsu Ltd, the developer of the Tokyo Stock Exchange's trading system, is still investigating causes of the bourse's worse-ever outage last week, the company's chief executive said on Monday.
A hardware glitch paralysed trading in the world's third-largest equity market for the entire session last Thursday, testing the exchange's credibility just as the country's new prime minister has prioritised digitalisation.
"We will make utmost efforts to find the causes and prevent recurrences of such troubles," Fujitsu CEO Takahito Tokita said at a previously scheduled briefing on the company's digital strategy.
The TSE has said the glitch was the result of a hardware problem at its "Arrowhead" trading system, and a subsequent failure to switch to a back-up. It caused the first full-day suspension since the exchange switched to all-electronic trading in 1999.
Arrowhead, developed by Fujitsu, debuted in 2010, bringing processing times for trades to 5 milliseconds — on a par with the New York and London stock exchanges at the time. The system got an overhaul last November, and currently processes orders in about 0.2 milliseconds.
Asked who was responsible for the system failure, Tokita said it was too early to say because the investigation was still ongoing. He declined to comment further on a client's business.
The TSE has said it has no plans at this point to ask Fujitsu for compensation. Tokita said Fujitsu had made no decision on the issue.