Folha Group

Grupo Folha S.A.

Type	Private
Industry	Media conglomerate
Founded	1921
Headquarters	São Paulo, Brazil
Key people	Luís Frias, (Chairman)
Products	Newspaper, Publisher, Internet
Revenue	US$ 3.0 billion (2012)
Net income	US$ 500.0 million (2012)
Number of employees	7,000
Website	Grupo Folha

Grupo Folha is the third largest Brazilian media conglomerate, after Grupo Globo and Grupo Abril. It was founded by Octavio Frias de Oliveira (1912–2007) and led by his son Luiz Frias since 1992.

The group publishes Folha de S.Paulo, the largest circulation paper in the country, which since 1986 keeps the leadership among quality general-interest newspapers in Brazil. In the last decade, the group nearly tripled its revenue, getting to R$2.7 billion in 2010. EBITDA reached R$600 million in 2011.

In February 2012, Folha widened its lead among prestige newspapers in Brazil, with an average of 297.5 thousand monthly copies in circulation, 12% ahead of O Globo and 20.3% ahead of O Estado de S. Paulo, competitors in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo states. Besides Folha, the group publishes Agora São Paulo newspaper and has 50% shares at Valor Econômico, in partnership with Organizações Globo. Both are circulation leaders, respectively, in popular journalism and business journalism markets.

Folha did the first real-time online newspaper in 1995, also a market leader among Brazilian news websites, with 232.8 million pageviews in March 2012. Amount of unique visitors was 19.2 million that month (audience measured by Omniture, which also provides metrics for Apple and CNN).

UOL, controlled by Grupo Folha, is the leading Brazilian company for Web content and services, with 27.8 million unique visitors and about 4.3 billion pageviews every month. Launched in April 1996, UOL offered both Web access and content in a single package, becoming the leading ISP in the country. Later, it also specialized as an IT company, acting in ecommerce and epayments, gaming, dating websites, datacenters and IT solutions. In December 2010, UOL concluded the acquisition of Diveo Broadband Networks, becoming the third largest IT infrastructure services company in Latin America.