The ISP says it serves about 10% of LatAm Net accounts and that it is among the world’s top 20 providers.

However, the company has yet to turn a profit. Brazil's dominant Internet company, Universo On Line, announced that it has become the first Latin American ISP to reach 1 million clients, or about 10 percent of the region's total Internet accounts. The figure places UOL among the 20 biggest ISPs worldwide, according to general director Caio Tulio Costa. UOL, whose largest shareholders are Brazil's Folha newspaper and the giant editorial house Abril, launched five years ago and established itself as the leading Internet portal and service provider in Brazil, which accounts for about half of the total Internet users in Latin America. According to the company's audited figures, UOL has 46 million page views per day and over 10 million unique visitors per month, with traffic growth of about 50 percent over the past 12 months. But despite its smashing success, UOL has yet to turn a profit. In June 1999 the company embarked on a costly regional expansion, hoping that would help it go public on the Nasdaq in 2000. But the market crash put those plans on hold, and the company has turned its focus on achieving profitability instead.Last year, UOL's revenues were slightly below $100 million. UOL has recently announced a sweeping alliance with telephone operator Portugal Telecom that should help it extend its lead in Brazil. PT Multimedia, a unit of Portugal Telecom, agreed to pay $100 million in cash and sell its Zip.Net online unit to UOL for a 17.9 percent stake in UOL. Zip.Net is Brazil's fourth-most popular portal, with about 500 million monthly page views.