Asos, the online fashion retailer, set a target of becoming a £400 mil-lion-a-year business yesterday after shrugging off the doom and gloom spreading across the high street by reporting record-breaking sales.

The group, which floated six years ago, said that its orders had surged by more than 100 per cent in the past nine weeks with no sign of the drop-off in consumer confidence hitting more traditional retail rivals.

Asos enjoyed its best day’s trading on Tuesday, taking £800,000 from customers snapping up clothing designed “in the style of” that worn by a range of celebrities, such as Kate Moss and Sienna Miller.

Pretax profits for the six months to September 30 were £2.4 million, against £300,000 last year. Turnover was up 83 per cent at £31.8 million.

Nick Robertson, the chief executive, said that revenue for the year as a whole was likely to be about £75 million. He added there was no reason that growth could not continue in the 70-to100 per cent range for the next two to three years, a rate that could take Asos to £400 million by 2011.

Mr Robertson said: “It’s very hard to plan more than two years out but the internet opportunity is just unfolding in front of us. I become more bullish year-in, year-out.

“People ask: ‘How will the competition affect you?’ But we have just increased our sales by 100 per cent. It’s not how the competition might affect us but how we are affecting them.

“For every £1 we may be losing because of the economic climate, we are winning £1 and a bit more because there is a preference for online.”

Shares in Asos – As Seen on Screen – have risen by almost 1,000 per cent since they were listed on the Alternative Investment Market in 2001 at 20p. Yesterday they surged another 21p, or 12 per cent, to a record high of 203p, valuing the group at £148 million.

Asos stocks more than 6,500 items, up from 4,700 a year ago, and has built a customer base of 1.6 million by offering lower-priced versions of designer dresses and tops worn by celebrities on both sides of the Atlantic. Top-selling items include a silk-deco embroidered dress similar to one worn by Lindsay Lohan and a ruffle satin halter-neck dress resembling one worn by Sarah Harding, from Girls Aloud. A “Superdry” leather jacket similar to one worn by David Beck-ham is three times more popular than any other leather jacket on the website.

Mr Robertson, who co-founded the business and retains a 13.5 per cent stake, said that recent surveys showed that more than half of 16-to 24-year-old women across the UK bought clothing online once a month.

He added that PriceWaterhouse-Coopers believed that clothing had now overtaken music and books as the prime driver of retail sales on the internet.

Asos wanted to bring more brands on to its website and become the one-stop shop for those shopping the internet for fashion, Mr Robertson said. Brands such as Karen Millen, Oasis and Coast make up 30 per cent of the goods sold by the company.

Mr Robertson said that Sir Philip Green’s Topshop would be an obvious next step. “I’ve spoken to Philip in the past, but not about that – but it’s a natural evolution from where we are,” he said. “We stock French Connection, so why not Topshop? We think that there is an opportunity to be the online store for fashion. The good news is that we are a little bit further down the line than anybody else. If anybody is going to win the race, we are.”

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