Iran's Exit Problem Is an Exchange Rate Problem

One Swedish investor publishes the only audited, annually marked valuation of an Iranian technology portfolio we have found anywhere. In the year to 30 April 2025 it wrote that portfolio down 36.4 percent. In the same report, its largest holding grew revenue 90 percent. The gap is not about the companies. It is about which exchange rate you are allowed to convert at.

Every year a Swedish company called Pomegranate Investment publishes an audited annual report that almost nobody outside a small shareholder register reads. It is a public company but not an exchange-listed one, traded over the counter, and it holds the only regularly published, audited, marked-to-market valuation of a portfolio of Iranian technology companies that Tehran Index has been able to identify anywhere. Digikala, Cafe Bazaar, Divar, Sheypoor, Griffon Capital, all carried at a number, all signed off by an auditor, all restated once a year in euro.

In the year to 30 April 2025, that portfolio fell 36.4 percent. Net asset value went from 190.1 million euro to 120.3 million, or from 29.8 euro a share to 18.7. Not one holding was flat. The smallest position lost 70.7 percent of its mark.

In the same document, the largest holding reported that its revenue grew 90 percent.

The companies grew. The mark collapsed anyway.

Read the Digikala section of that report and there is no distress in it. For its financial year ending March 2025, the group reports net merchandise value up 71 percent, revenue up 90 percent, and profit before tax up 75 percent. Cost discipline improved. The business-to-business line alone generated over 13 trillion rial of revenue in the final month of the year. This is a company compounding, not a company in trouble.

And its direct mark in the portfolio fell 39.9 percent.

That divergence is the single most important thing an outside investor needs to understand about this market, and it has nothing to do with the quality of the companies. Operating performance is measured in rial. Returns are measured in euro or dollars. Between those two measurements sits an exchange rate, and in this period the exchange rate did all the work.

Two forces, and only one of them was the currency

That the rial destroys dollar returns is not news, and we have made the argument before in Iran’s Hidden Unicorns, which priced these companies against regional multiples. This report is the audited evidence for it. But it also names a second cause, and that one has not been written up in English anywhere we can find.

The first cause is the obvious one: the rial fell close to 50 percent against the euro over the twelve months. The second is a methodology change. Pomegranate moved its conversion basis from the NIMA rate, which it describes as now defunct, to the open market rate, and applied that to all of its local assets.

So part of the writedown is the currency moving and part of it is a decision about which currency price to use. Both are disclosed. And the second tells you something the first does not: there was never one exchange rate for these assets. There were several, and the difference between them was material enough to move an audited net asset value by tens of millions of euro. That is the fact worth building a model around.

The rate you are allowed to convert at is the whole return

Here is the sentence in that report that should reframe how anyone models an Iranian technology investment. Pomegranate says it is seeking, and believes it will be allocated, the investment-protected rate under FIPPA, Iran’s foreign investment protection framework, for its key assets. It calls this an upside.

That is a precise claim about mechanics. A foreign investor who registered under FIPPA may be entitled to convert and repatriate at a protected official rate rather than the open market rate. The gap between those two rates is not a rounding difference in Iran. It can be the difference between a return and a writeoff, on an identical underlying business, in the same year.

Our own registry shows this is not theoretical for the asset in question. Digikala’s 2016 round, the 100 million dollars that brought the first foreign capital into the company, was made under a FIPPA licence. The protection was designed in from the start. Ten years later, whether it converts into cash at a favourable rate is still described by the investor as something it believes it will be allocated, in the future tense.

For an allocator the implication is uncomfortable and clean. In this market you are not underwriting a growth rate or a multiple. You are underwriting a conversion right.

What our own data says happens next

Pomegranate discloses the rate it used: 922,450 rial to the euro at 30 April 2025. Tehran Index runs a daily rial series built from five independent quotes. On 8 August 2026 it puts the euro at 2,164,100 rial, and the dollar at 1,869,500 rial.

The euro is therefore 2.35 times more expensive in rial than it was at that balance-sheet date. Applying the report’s own stated method, a holding whose rial value has not moved at all would mark roughly 57 percent lower in euro today than it did then. The company’s financial year ends on 30 April, so the year to 30 April 2026 is already closed and not yet published. That is the number to watch, and this is the arithmetic to check it against.

We are not forecasting their net asset value. Rial values will have moved, marks are a matter of judgement, and a protected conversion rate would change the answer materially. We are stating what their disclosed method produces when the only input we can observe independently moves the way it has.

This is why the exit record looks the way it does

Once you see the exit problem as a conversion problem, the transaction record stops looking sparse and starts looking logical. Tehran Index counts four disclosed control transactions in Iranian consumer technology since the market’s first startup listing in September 2022. In every one of them the buyer was an Iranian strategic acquirer or the Iranian public market. There is no foreign acquirer anywhere on the record.

The most instructive row is the one with no headline price. In August 2024 the two foreign shareholders on Digikala’s register, a Dutch investment cooperative formed in 2015 by European investors and the Swedish company whose report this piece is built on, transferred all their shares to a local special-purpose company for a deferred purchase price, and became creditors. Their own audited report says so in a footnote.

Note what that does and does not solve. It removes them from the equity register. It does not produce dollars. A deferred claim on a local vehicle still has to be paid, and then converted, at some rate, at some future date. The conversion problem is not avoided by becoming a creditor. It is deferred, with counterparty risk added on top.

The exchange is doing the work no acquirer will

Against all of this, the Tapsi sequence stands out as the only complete cycle anyone has executed. The company listed on Iran Fara Bourse on 19 September 2022 at 939 toman a share, floating 5 percent, and the offering sold out in under an hour. Seventeen months later a Golrang family vehicle took control through an on-exchange block trade and now holds 69.21 percent on the shareholder attendance record. The founders and early investors left the register in full.

Venture capital in, public listing, control trade, founders out. Domestically, in rial, without a single foreign counterparty. Pomegranate’s own stated strategy points the same direction: it lists a successful local IPO among the routes to realising its portfolio’s full value. In a market with no cross-border mergers and acquisitions, the Tehran exchanges are not a fundraising venue. They are the exit.

What to underwrite

Three things follow, and none of them require a view on anything but market mechanics.

Growth and realisable value are separate questions here, and a report that shows 90 percent revenue growth alongside a 40 percent writedown of the same asset is the cleanest proof of it that exists. Any model that stops at the operating line is measuring the wrong thing.

The buyer universe is short and knowable: a handful of industrial conglomerates, the telecom operators, a few holdings, and the exchange. Exit values should be built from what those buyers have actually paid, which is on the record above, and not from regional comparables drawn from markets where a foreign acquirer might turn up.

And the conversion right is the asset. Whether an investor holds a FIPPA registration, and whether the protected rate is actually allocated when it matters, will determine more of the outcome than anything that happens inside the company.

What we do not know

The gaps belong in the record. We do not know the rate Pomegranate will use for the year to 30 April 2026, nor whether the protected rate it is seeking has been granted. We do not know the terms of the deferred purchase price, its size, its schedule or its currency. The written terms of the Cafe Bazaar sale have never been published and the only price is the one the buying chief executive stated on the record. Digikala’s implied valuation comes from third-party analysis of an undisclosed transaction, and credible sources differ; we carry more than one. Snapp’s shareholder split has not been re-confirmed since 2020. And private transactions we cannot see will exist, because nothing compels their disclosure.

This note counts what is evidenced. In a market this opaque, that is the only number worth quoting.

Cite as: Tehran Index, “Iran’s Exit Problem Is an Exchange Rate Problem”, 8 August 2026. Portfolio and net asset value figures from the audited annual report of Pomegranate Investment AB (publ) for the year 1 May 2024 to 30 April 2025. Transaction record computed from the Tehran Index company registry and rial rates from the Tehran Index daily FX series, both on 8 August 2026. tehranindex.com