The price of silver has risen 50% since the start of the year, to just under $46 (£28) an ounce, and more than 150% in the past 12 months.

As a result, Agfa has implemented a worldwide "margin management strategy" across all its silver-based products, abandoning efforts to maintain or manage market share.

Agfa has said that in practice this will involve taking steps to raise film prices across all its business groups, while focusing R&D efforts on the reduction of silver content in all film products.

One US-based website has claimed that Agfa will impose a worldwide silver price surcharge from 16 May; however, Agfa PR manager Paul Adriaensen said that this referred solely to increases in the prices for Printed Circuit Board (PCB) film.

"We know that the prices [of silver] are high and going higher and so we do margin management as opposed to market growth management, because it is important to retain our margin on these products," he said.

"To do that we can raise prices or, if possible we look at a reduction of the amount of silver in the product. How that effectively is handled over the different business units will vary – so for PCB might be different than for Healthcare than for Graphics.

"This is because there are technical boundaries as to how much silver is needed in the product – we cannot say we're going to reduce 20% of the silver in all our products for instance because for Graphic Arts this probably would not work."

Adriaensen added that for Agfa Graphics film it could be possible to reduce the volume of silver for some markets, although only by "fractions of percentages" in some cases.

If silver continues on its current upward trend therefore, this will leave the manufacturer with no choice but to resort to price rises to achieve its margin management goal.