LONDON: Copper rose on Friday after six straight sessions of decline as a surge in inventories halted and workers were due to begin a strike at the Cerro Verde mine in Peru, raising supply fears.
Industrial metals rose broadly as a week-long rout of global commodities caused by a strong dollar, concerns of supply gluts and tepid demand from China began to falter.
Three-month copper on the London Metal Exchange was up 0.72 percent at $5,731.50 a tonne at 1128 GMT, after a drop of 1.4 percent in the previous session when prices fell to $5,652, their lowest since Jan. 10.
"Another supply disruption has returned attention to the possibility of a drawn-out supply disruption having a negative impact on supplies," Ole Hansen at Saxo Bank said.
"That's offsetting what has otherwise been a week where the market has been focusing on the dollar, which has been going higher, and these strong rises in LME inventories," he said.
Workers at Cerro Verde mine, one of Peru's largest copper producers, were due to begin a five-day strike on Friday over labour conditions. The action adds to disruptions at the world's two largest copper mines in Chile and Indonesia.
Analysts at Commerzbank estimated that the strike at Escondida in Chile, which began on Feb. 9, had caused 85,000 tonnes of lost production.
Its operator BHP Billiton has, however, said it may try to restart production using temporary workers once the strike surpasses 30 days.
Copper stocks in LME-registered warehouses fell by 1,800 tonnes on Friday, their first decline since March 2.
But stockpiles are still 125,500 tonnes, or 63 percent, higher than at the start of March and at their highest since December.
Rising inventories have helped push the copper price down 4 percent so far this month, spurring investors to abandon bets on higher prices. A record long position has largely unwound, reducing the risk of big price falls for copper, said Guy Wolf at Marex Spectron.
"After a wave of negative headlines and data-points bringing us back into the mid-$5k's, that is a better place to be expressing long positions in our view," he said.
Aluminium was up 1.8 percent at $1,903 a tonne.
Zinc was 1.4 percent higher at $2,719 a tonne, while lead was up 1 percent at $2,273 and tin was 0.4 percent higher at $19,360. Nickel was down 0.3 percent at $10,125 a tonne.
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