Copper gained ground on Monday, bouncing back from a dip on Friday, as investors cheered stronger-than-expected China industrial output data and focused on the so-called fourth plenum - a key meeting of the Chinese leadership.
Benchmark three-month copper on the London Metal Exchange was up 0.4% at $10,648.50 as of 0900 GMT.
Top metals consumer China’s industrial output grew 6.5% year-on-year in September, data from the National Bureau of Statistics showed on Monday. That beat a forecast of 5.0% growth and boosted sentiment, even as China’s gross domestic product grew at its slowest pace in a year in the third quarter.
“With the production data coming in hotter than market expectations, that’s good for the base metals group,” said Nitesh Shah, commodity strategist at WisdomTree.
“But also I think we’ve still got the ‘halo effect’ from LME Week,” said Shah, referring to last week’s metals gathering in London. “Everyone was discussing the potential wider deficits in the copper market. I think that’s likely to continue to grind prices higher over the next few weeks.”
A series of mining disruptions, including at the Grasberg copper and gold mine in Indonesia, have prompted analysts to revise their market balance forecasts.
Eyes were also on the plenum in Beijing from Monday to Thursday, where top Chinese Communist Party officials will review a proposed five-year plan for 2026-2030, as well as on U.S.-China trade talks.
“We know discussions are happening behind closed doors in China and anything that leaks out… could move the market in one direction or the other,” Shah said.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said he expects to meet Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng in Malaysia this week to try to forestall an escalation of U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods.
Among other LME metals, aluminium and nickel both slipped 0.1%, to $2,775.50 and $15,100 a ton, respectively, while zinc rose 0.8% to $2,956, lead climbed 0.6% to $1,982 and tin edged up 0.1% to $34,965.
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