Like Great Universal Stores of old - the original Manchester-based home shopping group - N Brown has a remarkable knack of meeting its numbers through good times and bad.

Today’s first-half figures from the FTSE 250 company, which, with a stockmarket value of £640 million, is now bigger than Debenhams, HMV or WH Smith, were no exception. Pre-tax profits were up 20 per cent, with like-for-like sales ahead 12.6 per cent, despite strong comparative numbers last year. Neither is there any sign of slowdown in more recent trading: like-for-likes for the five weeks to October 4 were up 11.8 per cent. The only concern is that such gains have come partly at the expense of gross margins, which fell 0.8 percentage points.

As befits its reputation for prudence, N Brown is tightening its belt in the second half: it is keeping spending on attracting new customers flat and tightening its already stringent credit terms. To conserve cash, the interim dividend is also being raised less than earnings - by a modest 4.9 per cent.

With the shares having outperformed the FTSE all share index by 47 per cent over the last three months, the stock market has already priced much of that virtue into the shares. But at 217p, or 10 times current year earnings, they remain a relative safe haven in a troubled sector.

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