Brown Group Regulatory News (BWNG)

21 Jul 2005 12:30

Brown (N.) Group PLC21 July 2005 21 July 2005 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, group turnover is up by 4.2% with acontinued positive performance in our core home shopping business which is 7.5%up on last year. House of Bath customers accounted for 4.0% of this increase.The underlying 3.5% increase has been driven by maintaining a clear focus onsales of our niche product ranges to our target customers . We have seen growthin all of our customer groups and, in particular, our key clothing and footwearcategories. We expect our Autumn / Winter 2005 catalogues to continue building on ourstrengths with a further increase in the number of product options in largersizes of clothing, underwear and wider fitting footwear. On-line sales acrossall of our brands are still growing strongly, enabling more cost-effectivepromotional opportunities. The restructuring program for our non-core activities has progressed with thedisposals of Teleview and our personal loans portfolio realising a total of£16.25m. We expect to complete this program by the Autumn. We have also reviewedthe medium term prospects for our joint venture television shopping channel andhave decided to scale down the current level of investment. The retail sector remains challenging and highly competitive, but we believe ourtargeted catalogue and on-line offers will continue to be attractive to ourcustomer base and we are confident that we can make further progress in thecurrent year. For further information contact: N Brown Group plc Tel: 0161 238 2208Alan White, Chief ExecutiveDean Moore, Finance Director Gavin Anderson & Company Tel: 0207 554 1400Fergus Wylie / Charlotte Stone This information is provided by RNS The company news service from the London Stock Exchange