It paid its first dividend since 1997 in July but wants to wait to see how the second half pans out before committing itself to a second payout.Furniture, which is now the group’s biggest division with 29 per cent of total sales, was its slowest growing with a 1.5 per cent rise in like-for-like sales. David Cook, the finance director, said the group “could not expect” to maintain a double-digit rate of sales growth during its second half. Laura Ashley is opening up to 20 new stores over the next year in a confident gesture that suggests its recent woes are finally over. A return to form helped the furniture-to-fashion retailer climb back into the black during the first six months of its year, although it opted not to pay a dividend. Despite scaling back its clothing ranges, fashion was the group’s strongest performing division, posting a 45.5 per cent rise in underlying sales during the first half.

The retailer benefited from fashion’s obsession with dresses over the summer, with designs drawn from its heritage prints proving particularly popular.
Lillian Tan, who to date has shown more staying power as chief executive than any of her 11 recent predecessors, put the group’s stronger performance down to overhauling its product ranges. To further deter such activity, Mr Edwards said it has charged $200 (£105) per .mobi site. By comparison, a website can be registered for under £2 in the UK.Some of the sites to have gone live include weather.mobi and cityguide.mobi as well as company websites such as bmw.mobi and rolls-royce.mobi.Mr Edwards said he is encouraged that some companies have already begun advertising “.mobi” websites, arguing that it should trigger other companies to begin formulating a mobile internet strategy.. Over that period, mTLD has only allowed trademark owners to register .mobi sites as a way of avoiding the problem of “cyber-squatting” whereby individuals register well-known brand names to then sell on to the brand owners at inflated prices. Accessing familiar websites on a phone has proved cumbersome as those pages are designed to be viewed and navigated using a computer, not a phone.

It has also proved expensive as surfers pay to download an entire website that often includes rich graphics and functions that do not work on most handsets.To address some of these issues, the mobile phone industry has created the “.mobi” domain name to define websites specifically tailored for mobile phone screens. The body behind the domain name, mTLD Top Level Domain, is backed by the likes of Nokia, Ericsson, Vodafone, Google, Microsoft and 3.Neil Edwards, the head of mTLD, said almost 13,000 trademarked “.mobi” names have been registered since June. He also said that, so far, those free papers had not taken advertising away from its Metro paper.. The demand for internet domain names specifically used for mobile phones is expected to reach fever pitch next week when registration is opened up to the public. Nearly 13,000 trademarked websites have already been registered by companies over the past four months. Next Tuesday, the public can apply to register web sites using the “.mobi” suffix on a first-come, first-served basis. The company charged with registering names expects up to 90,000 such sites to be registered within the initial 10-day “land-rush” period as people look to snap up domain names that could prove lucrative in the future.