Friday, 27 March 2015 10:21
MELBOURNE: London copper fell on Friday but was set for its third straight weekly climb, supported by mine closures in key producer Chile due to heavy rains and a slow pick-up in seasonal demand from top consumer China.
“Copper has had a pretty good run over the past month, leading the complex as usual,” said analyst Daniel Hynes of ANZ in Sydney.
“But if we’re going to see any sustainability in this rally, we’d want some positive data following through, which we haven’t really seen just yet.”
Three-month copper on the London Metal Exchange was down 1.2 percent at $ 6,100 a tonne at 0400 GMT. That erased gains from the previous session, when prices hit their highest since Jan. 2 at $ 6,294.50.
LME copper was on course for a weekly gain of around 0.9 percent, its first three-week winning streak since mid-2014.
The most-traded June copper contract on the Shanghai Futures Exchange fell 0.6 percent to 43,550 yuan ($ 7,006) a tonne.
LME lead is on track to rise about 6 percent in March, after nearly 100,000 tonnes of LME stocks were made ready to ship out this week, cutting off available supply.
Pollution and the lead positioning scandals over the past couple of years in China have hit lead production, added ANZ’s Hynes.
“You marry that up with what is some of the more positive data trends at the minute, being the autosector in China – it creates a bullish fairly bullish scenario,” he added.
China’s imports of lead concentrates surged by 44 percent in February.
A sudden turnaround in the dollar’s fortunes overnight saw the currency trading broadly higher in Asia, after an upbeat US jobs report. A stronger dollar erodes the purchasing power of those paying for commodities with other currencies.
The number of Americans filing new claims for jobless benefits fell more than expected last week, while activity in the services sector hit a six-month high in March, underscoring the economy’s solid fundamentals despite a recent softening in growth.
Elsewhere, a US judge on Thursday refused to dismiss antitrust litigation accusing a variety of Wall Street banks and commodity merchants of conspiring to drive up aluminium prices by reducing supply.
Chile’s Codelco, the world’s No. 1 copper producer, said on Thursday it was gradually reopening mines in the north of the country that were closed on Wednesday due to heavy rains, but that its Salvador mine remained shuttered.
Copyright Reuters, 2015
