The central bank and stock market regulators have taken the lead in ensuring that computers at banks and securities firms were millennium compliant, industry officials said on Friday.

China has some nine million computers and many of them, particularly in big state industry, will be at risk once the clock ushers in the year 2000.

"They're not interested in it, not yet," said Jim King, vice president of sales and marketing for Dell Computer (China) Co Ltd, when asked if Chinese customers had shown concern about the problem. "So far it is not a focus."

In the populous eastern city of Shanghai, the telephone authority had just awakened from a comfortable slumber to form a working group to tackle the problem, local media said.

China was not alone. The regional financial turmoil and a fledgling information technology industry had left many Asian nations without the means to prepare for the day when their computers might be unable to recognise the year 2000.

A space-saving practice could make computers misread 2000 for 1900, causing miscalculations or even a system crash.

"Asia in general is not addressing the year 2000," said Phil Kelly, president for the Asia-Pacific group of Dell Computer Corp .

"I feel pretty good about the financial institutions, the major government banks, in all of the countries," he said.

"The places that are really exposed are each of the local businesses, whether it be an Indonesian business, a Chinese business or a Hong Kong business."

Germany's Siemens AG said it was working with clients in China -- ranging from the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China to Baoshan Iron and Steel Corp -- to resolve the problem, but industry and the power sector were at risk.

"In the industrial area, it is much more difficult," said Ernst Behrens, president of Siemens Ltd, China.

China's central bank has been vague about specific deadlines, but senior bank officials have vowed to take "timely measures" to face the millennium.

"China's big commercial banks are making great efforts and I think they can all complete the work," said a top official of the China Foreign Exchange Trade System, which counts among its members the nation's financial institutions.

The China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC), the stock market watchdog, had set a deadline of June 1999 for the nation's brokerages and stock and futures exchanges to be ready to meet the challenge, an official newspaper said on Monday.

"Every important leader must personally assume command and take practical measures to resolve technological risk and protect the safety and stability of the securities market," CSRC chairman Zhou Zhengqing was quoted as saying.