At the beginning of the week, the price of aluminum rose to its highest level in more than a decade.

The unrest in Guinea has raised concerns about the supply of the industrial metal.

In the African country, military units have seized power and suspended the constitution.

The chief of the special forces, Colonel Mamady Doumbouya, asked the army to support him.

The price of a ton of aluminum for immediate delivery rose to $ 2,775.50 a ton in London. Only around 15 dollars separate it from the high of 2011. In Shanghai, prices climbed to 21,635 yuan, the highest level since 2006. Guinea is an important supplier of the raw material bauxite - political instability increases the possibility of delivery interruptions . The impact on exports has so far been difficult to assess because the news of the coup is still fresh, says a stockbroker.

The Aluminum Corporation of China, the largest aluminum producer that also runs a bauxite project in Guinea, has since announced that operations are running normally and that there is more than enough bauxite in the factories in China.

Nevertheless, the share price in Hong Kong rose by up to 10 percent.

The market could be “severely shaken” by the situation, said the founder of the metal producer Rusal, Oleg Deripaska, via the Telegram news service.

Meanwhile, the company's share price in Hong Kong rose 14 percent to its highest level since 2012.

The price of aluminum has already risen by around 38 percent in London this year. While massive global economic stimulus measures boosted demand, manufacturing companies in China, the largest producer of aluminum, struggled to maintain production in the wake of a seasonal power shortage. In addition, the leadership in Beijing is trying to reduce the country's CO2 emissions and therefore tend to restrict the high-emission production of aluminum. More than half of all Chinese bauxite imports come from Guinea. Investors are rather concerned about this, said Xiong Hui, chief aluminum analyst at Beijing Antaike, told Bloomberg news agency.

China accounts for around 60 percent of global production, but has also committed itself, due to existing concerns, to ensuring supplies and releasing metal from state reserves to alleviate bottlenecks.

Nevertheless, the country is currently increasingly dependent on imports.

This rather unusual development has put a heavy strain on global supplies of the normally abundant metal.

The price of aluminum had fallen significantly at the beginning of the corona pandemic.

With higher consumer demand and economic activity, however, it rose sharply to the current level.

In the longer term, experts expect that use in electric vehicles and applications in the field of renewable energies will boost prices.