LONDON: Aluminium prices climbed to an 11-week high on Thursday as buying interest increased with improving demand prospects from top consumer China.

Three-month aluminium on the London Metal Exchange (LME) touched $2,313.5 per metric ton, the highest since Jan. 4. It last traded up 1.7% at $2,311.5 per ton in official open-outcry trading.

Top consumer China imported 720,000 tons of unwrought aluminium and products in January-February this year, up 93.6% from the same period last year, customs data showed.

“Aluminium has been lagging behind its base metals peers, it is cheap. The latest Chinese import data is surprising and widely cited as a short-term driver,” a trader source said. Brokerage Marex also saw improving demand for LME aluminium.

“Money is coming in, and we have seen evidence of that first in copper but more recently in aluminium,” said Alastair Munro, senior base metals strategist at Marex, anticipating more capital flows into underperforming commodity assets.

In other metals, LME lead was up 0.4% at $2,072. LME lead stocks rose 34% on Wednesday to their highest in 11 years after massive arrivals of metal in warehouses in Singapore and South Korea. Visibility of lead stocks has pushed the discount for the cash over the three-month contract to above $50 a ton, its highest since June 1992.

Overall industrial metals prices are likely to be capped by a stronger dollar, which makes it costlier to buy the greenback-priced commodity.

The dollar index strengthened on Thursday after US jobless claims unexpectedly fell and the Federal Reserve decided to keep key rates unchanged.

LME copper was up 0.7% at $8,987 a ton, nickel increased 0.6% to $17,600, zinc rose 1.5% to $2,545 and tin jumped 1.7% to $27,770.