LONDON: Copper fell to its lowest in nearly three months on Tuesday after investors cut risk after disappointing US employment data on Friday raised concerns about slowing growth and as the International Monetary Fund said it saw lower commodity prices ahead.
Three-month copper on the London Metal Exchange was down 2.8 percent at $8,130.25 a tonne at 1443 GMT, having earlier hit its lowest since mid-January at $8,117.75.
Copper last week had finished flat ahead of Easter holiday closures, and a break below its range of $8,200 to $8,700 after more than two months may herald further chart-based losses ahead, traders and analysts said.
"US job numbers on Friday were disappointing. China and the US combined account for more than half of global copper consumption, so it's uppermost in a lot of investors' minds that the two engines of growth might be slowing," said analyst Robin Bhar of Societe Generale.
Investors also hung on to the possibility, however, that China and the United States would roll out monetary loosening policies to boost growth.
German government bond yields hit their lowest levels since September on Tuesday, and European shares fell as investors on returning from a long weekend switched to safer assets after the surprisingly weak US jobs data.
The IMF said on Tuesday that ommodity exporters should brace for lower prices given weak global economic activity.
"It's yet more confirmation that commodity prices generally are likely to strugglem while growth is as anaemic as it appears to be at the moment, and there's no real hope in the next few months that momentum will speed up," Bhar added.
China released March trade data on Tuesday, returning to an export-led trade surplus while imports grew less than expected.
Its imports of copper fell 4.6 percent to 462,182 tonnes in March from 484,569 tonnes in the previous month, data from the General Administration of Customs showed, but they were still the fourth-highest ever level.
"The copper imports were pretty solid numbers in the scheme of things," said analyst Dan Smith of Standard Chartered.
The data showed that the use of copper for financing purposes by traders in China's cash-strapped market was still popular, although suggested that weak end-use demand may be feeding through to imports, analysts said, keeping a lid on prices.
"In our view it would be premature to worry about a cooling of growth dynamism in China on the basis of this data, since copper imports were still more than 50 percent higher than the previous year's figures," Commerzbank analysts said in a note to clients.
"Nonetheless, we do anticipate that dynamism will continue to decrease over the next few months, which may prevent any significant rise in prices," the bank added.
The numbers also came on the heels of data on Monday showing that China's annual inflation rate jumped more than expected in March to 3.6 percent as food prices remained volatile.
In other base metals, aluminium traded down 1 percent at $2,087.25 a tonne, while tin was down 1.7 percent at $22,776. Nickel and lead fell almost three percent to $17,911 and $2,001.25 respectively, while zinc fell by 1.1 percent to $1,980.75.
Refined tin shipments from Indonesia, the world's top exporter, fell 4.9 percent in March to 8,607.71 tonnes from 9,051.46 tonnes a year earlier, a trade ministry official said on Tuesday.
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