One of Iran’s Listed Tech Companies Pays No Interest. Another Pays 3.6 Times Its Operating Profit.

Six of the seven technology and telecom companies in the Tehran Index registry that trade on an Iranian exchange filed statements between 20 and 22 October 2026, and nobody appears to have read them together in English. Finance costs per 1 of operating profit run from nil at System Group, which has no borrowings at all, to 3.56 at Asan Pardakht Persian, whose operating margin for the half year was about a third of one per cent. Of the five companies with a comparable prior period, all five paid more than a year earlier, by 11 to 373 per cent. Before this, 8 of 4,091 public facts on the record carried a finance cost and all 8 were Tapsi.

Between 20 and 22 October 2026, six of the seven technology and telecom companies in the Tehran Index registry that can be bought on an Iranian exchange filed financial statements for the period ended 22 September. All six cover the same period end, so they landed inside three days of each other, and nobody appears to have read them together in English. The seventh, Asan Pardakht Persian, filed its audited half year on 5 October.

Read one line in each, the finance cost line, and the price of money in Iran’s listed technology sector turns out not to be one number. It runs from nothing at all to 3.56 times everything the business earned from operating.

That spread is the finding. Until today the Tehran Index record carried eight public facts with a finance cost in them, out of 4,091 public facts on 385 public company records, and all eight were Tapsi. We have written twice about what Tapsi pays to borrow and once about Behpardakht Mellat. One company is an anecdote. Seven is a sector.

The seven, side by side

The measure is the simplest one available and it needs no currency conversion, no inflation adjustment and no assumption: finance costs divided by operating profit, both taken from the same column of the same statement. It answers the question an owner actually asks. Of what the business earned before interest, how much went to the lenders.

Asan Pardakht Persian is the outlier and it is not a marginal one. In the six months to 22 July 2026 it earned 36.4 billion toman of operating profit on 10,500.2 billion toman of revenue, a margin of about a third of one per cent, and was charged 129.6 billion toman in finance costs. The audited comparative half year in the same filing shows operating profit of 89.5 billion toman against a finance bill of 68.4. So operating profit fell 59 per cent while the interest bill rose 89, and a company that was just covering its finance costs out of operating profit now covers less than a third of them.

At the other end, System Group, the one enterprise software company among the seven, paid nothing. Not a small amount: the finance cost line on its income statement reads zero for the half year and for both comparative periods, and its statement of financial position shows no borrowings at all, current or long-term, at each of the three dates it prints. Its operating profit for the half year was 1,605.7 billion toman on 2,526.4 billion toman of revenue.

An Iranian software company and an Iranian payment company, six months each, the same market and the same banking system. One handed over 3.56 toman to lenders for every toman of operating profit. The other handed over nothing.

Five bills, and all five went up

Five of the seven print a comparable prior period in the same filing and carry a finance cost in both. In every one of the five, the bill is larger than it was a year earlier, by between 11 and 373 per cent.

The ratio to operating profit does not move the same way, because operating profit moved too, and in two cases violently. At Tapsi and at the Telecommunication Company of Iran, the ratio improved sharply while the bill still grew, because the prior-year half was unusually weak at the operating line. Those are recoveries in the business, not relief on the debt. Behpardakht Mellat went the other way on both counts: its finance costs nearly quintupled, to 572.4 billion toman for the nine months, while operating profit rose 7 per cent, and its net profit fell 43 per cent to 260.9 billion toman even though revenue rose 70.

The two companies where the finance bill has visibly cut into the bottom line are both payment processors: Asan Pardakht Persian, and Behpardakht Mellat, whose net profit fell 43 per cent while revenue rose 70. That is the one pattern in this set that is not explained by a single company’s circumstances, and it sits on top of what we found on 1 October about this industry: most of what these companies book as revenue is buying mobile phone top-up and selling it on, a line that turns over very large sums at a very thin margin. Asan Pardakht Persian’s own half year makes the point: 10,500.2 billion toman of revenue, a gross margin of 4.0 per cent, an operating margin of a third of one per cent, and almost no room left between operating profit and the interest bill.

The debt behind the bill

Behpardakht Mellat’s borrowings are the fastest-moving number in the set. They stood at 967.1 billion toman at 21 December 2024, 3,428.6 at 21 December 2025 and 5,036.3 at 22 September 2026: 5.21 times in twenty one months, and almost all of it has moved to the long-term line, 4,778.5 of the 5,036.3. Asan Pardakht Persian’s borrowings went from 503.2 billion toman at 21 March 2025 to 1,167.1 at 22 July 2026, 2.32 times in sixteen months. Tapsi’s are the heaviest relative to its own capital, at 9.15 times equity, a position we have written about twice and which the latest filing leaves intact. Hamrah-e Aval is the only one of the seven whose borrowings fell, by 11.8 per cent since 20 March 2026.

The market has not priced this consistently

It would be neat to report that the market has sorted these companies by their cost of money. It has not. Over the same window covered by our own weekly captures, the only one of the seven whose share price fell is Asan Pardakht Persian, the one paying 3.56. But Tapsi, the most leveraged of the seven against its own equity, rose 134 per cent, the most of any of them, and the other five rose too.

So there is no clean relationship here, and we are not going to manufacture one. What the price table does establish is that the finance cost line is not yet a thing this market visibly reads, which is itself worth knowing for anyone who does read it.

What this does not tell you

The periods are not identical. Six of the seven cover a period ending 22 September 2026, two of them nine months and four of them six. Asan Pardakht Persian ends 22 July, because it moved its financial year: the Official Gazette notice published on 23 July 2026 records an extraordinary general meeting of 8 November 2025 changing its year end from late March to late January. Its current half year therefore begins in January and its comparative half year begins in March. Both are six months and neither covers the same calendar window.

The basis is not identical. Two of the seven filed consolidated statements and five filed the company’s own. We have used what each company filed rather than forcing a single basis, because forcing one would mean leaving out companies that do not publish it. For Tapsi the difference is material and known: on the consolidated basis its finance bill for the year to 20 March 2026 was 3.43 times operating profit and on the company basis 2.56. The table should be read as seven separate readings, never summed.

Six of the seven are unaudited. Only Asan Pardakht Persian’s half year has an audit opinion attached. The comparative columns are mostly audited and mostly restated, and none of the filings says why they were restated.

Finance costs are not the same thing as interest. The line these statements print is the standard Iranian finance cost line, which can include fees and foreign exchange losses on borrowing as well as interest, and none of the six filings that carry one breaks it down. The rate is given in only one case we have read, Tapsi’s year-end notes, where 94 per cent of company borrowing carried 39 per cent. We are not dividing any of these finance costs by any of these borrowings to produce an implied rate, because the periods, the bases and the composition of the line do not support it.

No dollar figure appears anywhere above, and that is deliberate. Six of these periods ended five weeks ago and the seventh just over three months ago. Converting any of them would mean choosing a rate for a window in which the rate itself moved, which would import more error than the underlying numbers contain, so the desk prints what the filings print. Toman figures above are rial divided by ten, which is a unit, not a rate.

Two of the seven are the fixed-line and the mobile operator. The Telecommunication Company of Iran runs the fixed network and Hamrah-e Aval the mobile one. TCI’s filing here is on the company basis and plainly does not consolidate Hamrah-e Aval, whose revenue is nearly four times larger. How much of Hamrah-e Aval TCI holds is not on our record and we do not assert it.

None of these figures is a fact row yet. Every number above was read off these seven filings today and the Tehran Index facts layer carries none of them, because this work publishes and does not write to the record. That debt is logged, and until it is paid a reader who follows a link above to a company page will not find these figures there.

For buyers

Every figure above came out of a document that is public, free and unreadable to most of the people it concerns. That is the job Tehran Index does: a company dossier at USD 3,000 carries the filing’s own words beside each number, and a registry check of who legally owns and runs an Iranian company is USD 750.

Cite as: Tehran Index, “One of Iran’s Listed Tech Companies Pays No Interest. Another Pays 3.6 Times Its Operating Profit.”, 27 October 2026. Figures read from the seven companies’ own filings on Codal. tehranindex.com