Jan. 3--A fortunate handful of Philadelphia-area companies bucked the stock market's plunge in 2008 to post solid gains -- a result of increased sales, low-cost products and conservative investing.

While it was a miserable year for U.S. banks, shares of Univest Corp. of Pennsylvania soared 52 percent, the third-best gain among local companies. The Souderton bank has 33 branches in Bucks and Montgomery Counties.

"We haven't experienced a lot of the losses that the bigger players have," Jeffrey M. Schweitzer, chief financial officer of Univest, said.

His explanation: Univest did not take too much risk with its investment portfolio and stuck to taking local deposits and making local loans instead of venturing far afield to unfamiliar parts of the country.

The company even spent nearly $10 million last week to buy two small businesses, and it declined last fall to apply for money from the federal government's $700 billion financial rescue.

"We didn't need it to lend," Schweitzer said.

The top two local stocks were in pharmaceuticals.

ViroPharma Inc., an Exton pharmaceutical manufacturer, was the leader. Its stock gained 64 percent on strong sales of a treatment for a bacterial infection that has been showing up more frequently in U.S. hospitals.

Shares in Lannett Co. Inc., a generic-drug maker in Philadelphia, climbed 62 percent as the company added new products and consumers sought low-cost drugs in a stumbling economy.

Such winners were rare last year among local stocks that started the year trading for at least $3 each. Only 14, or 7 percent, of the companies in the 200-member Inquirer/Bloomberg index of local stocks ended the year higher than they started it.

The rest declined along with consumer spending and the job, housing and credit markets. The index fell 31.2 percent, its worst annual drop since its inception in 1994.

Shares of companies based in the Philadelphia region lost $120 billion in stock-market value.

Still, the local market performance was slightly stronger than that of the Standard & Poor's 500 index. Just 5 percent, or 25, of its members were in the black for the year.

Overall, the S&P 500 fell 38.5 percent and lost $4.9 trillion in market value last year, nearly $1 trillion of it in the financial sector.

Locally, Wilmington's DuPont Co. was the biggest loser, shedding $16.81 billion in value, as the global recession cast a cloud over the diverse chemical company's prospects.