Behpardakht Mellat Earns More From Phone Credit Than From Processing Payments

Behpardakht Mellat is one of the two largest payment processors in Iran and it is listed in Tehran. Every month it files a four line breakdown of its revenue that nobody outside Iran appears to read. In the six months to 21 June 2026, Shaparak processing fees were 32.2 percent of its revenue, reselling mobile phone top-up was 38.1 percent and the largest single line, and contracts with its own parent Bank Mellat were 26.8 percent. The same filings show revenue up 56.9 percent and net profit down 29.9 percent, because total borrowings rose 4.59 times in eighteen months and finance costs now take 75.1 percent of operating profit. Across 1,289 public facts in the Tehran Index registry, three carry a finance cost and all three are Tapsi.

Behpardakht Mellat is one of the two largest payment processors in Iran, it is listed on the Tehran Stock Exchange, and it files a document every month that this desk has found no English reading of anywhere. The document is a monthly activity report, four revenue lines long, and it breaks the company’s revenue into the businesses that produced it. Read six months of them next to the interim statements filed on 11 August 2026 and the picture is not the one the name suggests.

Processing card payments is about a third of this company’s revenue. In the six months to 21 June 2026, Shaparak fees, the money it earns through Iran’s domestic card payment switch, came to 18,212,792 million rial, or 1,821.3 billion toman. That is 32.2 percent of revenue. The largest single line is something else entirely: reselling mobile phone top-up, at 21,553,541 million rial, or 2,155.4 billion toman, which is 38.1 percent. The third line, at 26.8 percent, is contracts with Bank Mellat, the bank whose name it carries.

The pattern is not a one-off half year. It holds in the full year to 21 December 2025 and in the eight months to 22 August 2026, and in all three periods top-up resale is the biggest line and processing fees sit near a third.

Why a reader should care about a revenue line

Because it changes what the revenue number means. A company that buys airtime and resells it books the whole ticket as revenue. A company that charges a fee for moving someone else’s money books only the fee. Behpardakht Mellat does both and reports them in one line item called operating revenue, so its revenue is not the same quantity as the revenue of a payments company that reports net. Anyone placing this business next to a foreign processor on a revenue multiple is comparing two different things.

The arithmetic that follows from it is visible in the same filings. Cost of revenue was 89.4 percent of revenue in the six months to 21 June 2026, and gross margin was 10.6 percent, down from 13.4 percent in the same six months a year earlier and 13.6 percent across the full prior year. The filings publish no margin for any individual line, so this piece does not attribute that compression to any one of them. What can be said is the pair of facts: this company’s gross margin is thin, and its largest revenue line is a resale line.

Revenue rose 57 percent. Profit fell 30 percent.

Revenue for the six months was 58,966,325 million rial, or 5,896.6 billion toman, against 37,592,942 a year earlier. That is a rise of 56.9 percent, which the filing itself rounds to 57. Net profit went the other way: 1,740,205 million rial against 2,482,286, down 29.9 percent. Earnings per share fell from 248 rial to 174.

One line explains almost all of it. Finance costs were 3,569,193 million rial against 896,164 a year earlier, which is 3.98 times as much, an increase the filing prints as 298 percent. They now consume 75.1 percent of operating profit. A year earlier they consumed 22.2 percent. Operating profit actually rose, by 17.6 percent, and non-operating income rose too, from 54,941 million rial to 912,359. The finance cost outweighed both: profit before tax fell 34.5 percent, and net profit fell 29.9 percent even though the tax charge more than halved.

The company borrowed to build, and the balance sheet shows it

The interim statements carry three balance sheets, and across the eighteen months they span, total borrowings went from 9,671,403 million rial at 22 December 2024 to 44,393,006 at 21 June 2026. That is 4.59 times. Long-term borrowings alone went from 2,098,547 to 39,839,861, which is nineteen times. Borrowings to equity went from 0.56 times to 2.32 times, and total liabilities now stand at 4.09 times equity.

Property, plant and equipment roughly doubled over the same eighteen months, from 28,217,950 million rial to 58,247,507, and total assets went from 45,411,037 to 97,313,967. The borrowing and the fixed-asset build moved together. The filings we read do not state that one funded the other, the cash flow statement was not read, and the filings do not itemise what the assets are, so this piece neither names them nor claims the link.

Operating profit grew 17.6 percent. Finance costs grew 298 percent. That is the half year in two lines.

Equity fell, from 20,136,027 million rial to 19,116,233, a drop of 5.1 percent in a half year in which the company earned a profit. The statement of changes in equity explains it without ambiguity: an approved dividend of 2,760,000 million rial was charged against retained earnings inside the period. That is the distribution on the year ended 21 December 2025, a 49.7 percent payout on that year’s net profit of 5,548,511, and it is larger than the half-year profit it sits beside. It is not a payout of 159 percent of earnings, and anyone reading the two numbers side by side without the year attached would conclude that it was.

In dollars, the numbers are small

Six months of revenue at one of Iran’s two largest payment processors is about $40.4 million. Six months of net profit is about $1.2 million. Total borrowings at 21 June 2026 are about $30.4 million. Those conversions use 145,793 toman to the dollar, the rate implied at the 30 June 2026 close by MTN’s reviewed interim statements, which this desk derived and published on 25 August 2026. It is nine days after the period end and it is a point in time rather than a period average. Because the rial weakened through the period, a period average would have been stronger, so every dollar figure here is a floor rather than an estimate. Nothing in this piece converts a figure for any period that ended less than ninety days ago: the market figures below stay in rial and toman.

What the market did with it

The interim statements were filed on 11 August 2026. Our market layer holds nine closes on this share between 8 July and 28 September 2026: 5,350 rial at the start and 6,690 at the end, a rise of 25.0 percent in rial. The filing landed in the middle of that run.

The run did not hold. The share peaked at 7,630 rial on 9 September and has fallen in each of the three captures since, to 6,690 on 28 September. For how Iranian listed returns read against the currency, see Tehran’s market rose 23 percent and so did the dollar, which measured the seven listed names over the summer.

At the 28 September close, 10 billion shares at 6,690 rial is a market capitalisation of 6,690 billion toman, and 12.1 times the earnings per share reported for the year to 21 December 2025. The share count is the one the filing implies and it reconciles: 1,740,205 million rial over 10 billion shares is 174.02 rial, against the 174 the filing prints. The market capitalisation is our arithmetic on an exchange close, not a valuation of our own.

What is new here, against what we have already published

On 11 August 2026 we published what it costs to borrow in Iran, measured on one listed startup, which found Tapsi’s finance costs at 3.43 times its entire operating profit and the swing to its first loss since listing. The open question that piece left was whether that was a Tapsi problem. It is not. Here is a second listed Iranian company, in a different sector, profitable, with a state bank for a parent, and the same mechanism is running at a lower intensity: finance costs at 0.75 times operating profit rather than 3.43, enough to turn a 57 percent revenue rise into a 30 percent profit fall without producing a loss. Two companies is not a market, but it is no longer one company. Across 1,289 public facts in this registry, exactly three carry a finance cost and all three are Tapsi.

On 30 July 2026 Iran’s banks now run 1 in 5 of its fintech brands counted the bank-owned brands and named Behpardakht Mellat as one of Bank Mellat’s two. That piece counted the relationships. This one prices one of them: 26.8 percent of this company’s revenue in the six months to 21 June 2026 came from contracts with its own parent, and the company’s own note attributes the increase in that line to a change of approach to revenue based on a proposal presented to Bank Mellat. A bank-owned fintech is not only distributed by its parent. In this case about a quarter of its revenue is earned under contracts with that bank.

On 14 August 2026 Iran built a startup board and almost nobody is on it established that seven registry companies trade on an Iranian exchange and that their filings sat unread. That was the setup. This is the first of the seven read properly.

What we do not know

We do not know which of the two largest Iranian payment processors is actually first, and our own estate disagrees with itself. Our weekly briefing of 21 August 2026 published Behpardakht Mellat as holding the largest share of Iranian payment value at 21.69 percent in 2025-26, from Shaparak’s economic report. A separate fact on the same company, from Shaparak’s monthly report for the month to 21 June 2025, puts it second by both transaction count and transaction value behind Saman Electronic Payment, by 1.49 points on count and 0.05 points on value. The periods are different so both can stand, and 0.05 points is a tie rather than a ranking. Neither reading is retired here and the piece says “one of the two largest” wherever the argument depends on it.

Two of the company’s own filings disagree about the same six months. The monthly activity reports add to 56,573,796 million rial of revenue for the six months to 21 June 2026. The reviewed interim statements print 58,966,325 for that period, which is 4.2 percent higher. The revenue split in this piece therefore uses the monthly reports, because they are the only documents that give a split at all, and the income statement figures use the interim, which is the reviewed document. The difference is not reconciled by either filing and is not reconciled here.

We do not know the margin on any revenue line, because the filings publish none, so no line here is called profitable or unprofitable. We do not know a transaction count or a processed value for the company from these documents, so revenue per transaction and a take rate cannot be computed from the filings, and nothing of that kind is estimated. We have not read the four pages of the management interpretive report attached to the interim, nor the 33 explanatory notes, which are a separate attachment that Codal serves through a download route this desk still cannot reach. The composition of the fixed-asset build appears in no sheet we read.

One caution on the label. Codal titles the 11 August filing as audited. The report inside it is a limited review under review standard 2410, its own paragraph states that the scope is far narrower than an audit, and it expresses no audit opinion. We call it reviewed throughout. The auditor separately notes exceptions on the timing of approved dividend payment, on the free-float threshold and on the absence of a nominations committee; the company filed a nominations committee notice on 17 August 2026 and a risk committee notice on 21 September 2026, which is a sequence and not a finding, and we draw no conclusion from it.

We have not established this company’s shareholding from the documents read. The Tehran Index registry records Behpardakht Mellat as Bank Mellat’s payments company, and the revenue line the filings print is titled Bank Mellat contracts, which makes the bank a named counterparty on the face of the accounts. The shareholder note inside the interim was not read, so the percentage held, and therefore the formal related party status of that 26.8 percent of revenue, is carried here on our own record rather than on this filing. No ownership figure is asserted.

Finally, on our own data. Our 20 August 2026 market capture carries a date on which Iranian exchanges do not trade and is excluded from every calculation here, as it was on 4 September. It is stated rather than smoothed.

Cite as: Tehran Index, “Behpardakht Mellat Earns More From Phone Credit Than From Processing Payments”, 1 October 2026. Revenue by line from Behpardakht Mellat’s monthly activity reports for the months ended 21 May 2026, 21 June 2026 and 22 August 2026; income statement, balance sheet, statement of changes in equity and independent auditor’s review report from its interim financial statements for the six months ended 21 June 2026, filed 11 August 2026, all on Codal and all read 29 September 2026. Figures reproduced as published, in million rial. Payment value shares from Shaparak’s economic reports. The toman per dollar rate of 145,793 at 30 June 2026 is derived from MTN Group’s reviewed interim note 16 and was published by Tehran Index on 25 August 2026. Percentages, ratios, shares of revenue, dollar conversions, the market capitalisation, the share count reconciliation and the registry counts are Tehran Index arithmetic, re-checked 1 October 2026 against the filings, the registry and the market layer. tehranindex.com