AGM Statement

Brown (N.) Group PLC 21 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 the following statement on current trading: In the first 20 weeks of the current year, group turnover is up by 4.2% with a continued 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 on sales of our niche product ranges to our target customers . We have seen growth in all of our customer groups and, in particular, our key clothing and footwear categories. We expect our Autumn / Winter 2005 catalogues to continue building on our strengths with a further increase in the number of product options in larger sizes of clothing, underwear and wider fitting footwear. On-line sales across all of our brands are still growing strongly, enabling more cost-effective promotional opportunities. The restructuring program for our non-core activities has progressed with the disposals 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 reviewed the medium term prospects for our joint venture television shopping channel and have decided to scale down the current level of investment. The retail sector remains challenging and highly competitive, but we believe our targeted catalogue and on-line offers will continue to be attractive to our customer base and we are confident that we can make further progress in the current year. For further information contact: N Brown Group plc Tel: 0161 238 2208 Alan White, Chief Executive Dean Moore, Finance Director Gavin Anderson & Company Tel: 0207 554 1400 Fergus Wylie / Charlotte Stone This information is provided by RNS The company news service from the London Stock Exchange
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