Brown Group Regulatory News (BWNG)

18 Jul 2006 07:01

Brown (N.) Group PLC18 July 2006 18 July 2006 N Brown Group plc AGM TRADING STATEMENT At the AGM being held today at 2.30pm, Lord Alliance, Chairman, will make thefollowing statement on current trading. In the first 20 weeks of the current year to 15th July 2006 group turnover fromcontinuing operations is up by 7.9% with strong growth in our core home shoppingbusiness where sales are up 9.4% on last year. The home shopping sales growth has been driven by improvements in performance inall key customer and product groups. In addition we continue to benefit from ourstrategy of increasing the number of active customers from better response ratesto our mailings together with successful recruitment campaigns. The proportionof total sales placed over the internet has exceeded 20% so far this year. Our drive to keep tight control of stock levels is proving successful, withtotal stocks now at last year's levels, even with the group's increased rate ofturnover. This has been achieved by more aggressive in-season markdowns whichwill reduce the rate of gross profit in the first half by 0.5%. The acquisition on 30th June 2006 of Gray and Osbourn, the high qualitywomenswear catalogue retailer, will provide us with the opportunity to developour share of the ABC1 customer demographic group, an area where we see goodpotential for growth. As we highlighted at the year-end, the comparatives with last year's strongresults will get increasingly demanding as the year progresses. However, theboard has confidence that the plans for the Autumn Winter season developed bythe management team will deliver further progress in the current year. ENQUIRIES: N Brown Group plcAlan White, Chief Executive Tel: 0161 238 2202Dean Moore, Finance DirectorWebsite: www.nbrown.co.uk Gavin Anderson & CompanyFergus Wylie Tel: 020 7554 1400 This information is provided by RNS The company news service from the London Stock Exchange