Iran’s Listed Payment Processors Sell More Airtime Than Payments

Every Iranian listed issuer files a monthly activity report, and for a payment company it is the only filing that breaks revenue into named contract lines. Six companies in Iran’s card-payment industry filed one for the month ended 22 September 2026. Tehran Index read all six and added them up: 39,637,874 of 62,343,547 million rial, 63.58 percent of the combined revenue of the five listed payment service providers, is buying mobile phone top-up and selling it on. At Asan Pardakht Persian, the largest of the six by revenue that month, the Shaparak transaction fee line is 4.28 percent of revenue and the PIN and credit line is 93.13 percent. One of these companies runs a 4.79 percent audited gross margin on that revenue.

Every company listed on an Iranian exchange files a monthly activity report. It is a short document, it renders as a web page rather than as an attachment, and for a payment company it does something none of that company’s other filings do: it breaks recognised revenue into named contract lines. Six companies in Iran’s card-payment industry filed one for the month ended 22 September 2026. Tehran Index has read all six.

Added together, the five that are licensed payment service providers reported 62,343,547 million rial of revenue in that month, about 6,234 billion toman. Of that, 39,637,874 million rial, or 63.58 percent, is one activity: buying mobile phone top-up and selling it on.

Processing card payments is the smaller business. At Asan Pardakht Persian, the largest of the six by revenue in that month, the line called Shaparak transaction fee revenue is 4.28 percent of what the company booked. The line called sale of PIN and credit is 93.13 percent.

The same month, six times

A monthly activity report is hard to compare across companies, because Iranian issuers keep different financial years and the cumulative column is measured from each company’s own year start. The single month column is not. All six of these filings cover the month that ran 23 August to 22 September 2026, so they can be laid side by side with nothing adjusted.

Five of the six are payment service providers and every one of them files an airtime line. The sixth, Tejarat Electronic Parsian Kish, is in this industry without being in this business: its filing is terminals, paper, printing, bank cards and cash machine services, and more than half of its month is selling POS devices. It is the only one of the six with no Tehran Index record, which is a gap in our registry rather than a fact about the company.

Why the biggest line is not the biggest business

Airtime resale is booked gross. A processor buys top-up at a discount from an operator and sells it at face value, and the revenue line is the face value. The fee lines are not gross in the same way, and two of these companies say so in the label itself: Iran Kish Credit Card and Parsian E-Commerce both write net fee received from Shaparak operations, while describing their top-up business as sales. One number is a turnover figure and the other is close to a margin figure, and they sit in the same column.

What that does to the economics is visible in one of these companies’ audited accounts. Parsian E-Commerce, whose filed revenue is 71.05 percent airtime over its year to date, reported operating revenue of 73,068,046 million rial for the year to 21 December 2025 restated, against cost of operating revenue of 69,564,972 million rial. That is a gross profit of 3,503,074 million rial, a gross margin of 4.79 percent. In its audited half year to 21 June 2026 the same ratio is 5.27 percent. Both figures are on its record, taken from the audited statements themselves.

So the revenue line of an Iranian payment processor is mostly not a measure of its payment business. Anyone building a view of this sector from a revenue figure, and that includes anyone reading a market screener, is reading airtime pass-through with a payments company’s name on it.

The one line that is comparable, and it moves eight-fold

Two of the six name a Shaparak fee line on its own, with nothing bundled into it. For the same month, that line is 4.28 percent of revenue at Asan Pardakht Persian and 34.81 percent at Behpardakht Mellat, an eight-fold spread between two companies doing the same regulated job on the same national network. The other three processors bundle terminal rental into the fee line and so cannot be set against either.

The spread is a statement about business model rather than about pricing. Shaparak fees per transaction are set centrally. What differs is how much non-processing volume each company has stacked on top of its licence, and on that measure the five are not one sector at all: airtime is 93.13 percent of one of them and 33.94 percent of another in the same month.

What is new here

On 1 October Tehran Index published Behpardakht Mellat earns more from phone credit than from processing payments, which read the same kind of document for one company and found top-up resale at 38.1 percent of revenue against Shaparak processing at 32.2 percent for its six months to 21 June 2026. Those figures hold: at nine months the same lines read 37.52 and 32.52 percent.

What that piece could not say is whether one company was the sector or the exception. It is the exception, and in the direction nobody would guess. Behpardakht Mellat has the highest processing share of the five and the lowest airtime share. The pattern it was taken to illustrate is much stronger elsewhere, and the sector figure, 63.58 percent of combined revenue from airtime, exists in no filing. It has to be added up, and until today nobody had added it up in English.

It also narrows something in Iran built a startup board and almost nobody is on it. The listed Iranian technology names are few, and five of them are payment processors whose published revenue turns out to be mostly a different business.

What we do not know

These are not audited numbers and they are not reviewed. They are management figures, and Asan Pardakht Persian’s own note on this filing says the month’s amounts are entered on the most accurate estimates available, because confirming Shaparak fees and bank project statements takes time, and that any difference will be corrected in later months. That correction mechanism is not theoretical. The same company’s filing for the month ended 19 February 2026 printed a prior-year total of 131,132,639 million rial; the amendment to it, and every filing since, prints 124,156,559, which is 5.32 percent lower, and the company attributes the change to a fault in the Codal platform. We use the amended figure.

We do not know the margin on the airtime line at any of these companies, because none of the six publishes a cost of sales by line. The 4.79 percent we quote is one company’s blended gross margin, not its airtime margin. We do not know how the monthly reports reconcile to the audited accounts: a previous reading of Behpardakht Mellat found its monthly reports summing 4.2 percent below its own reviewed interim for the same six months, and nothing in these filings explains that class of gap. We have not read a December year end for the five, because it has not happened yet. And we hold no record at all for Tejarat Electronic Parsian Kish, whose relationship to Parsian E-Commerce the available filings describe in two incompatible ways, so this piece says nothing about it beyond what its own filing header states.

No figure in this piece is converted to dollars. Every period here ended inside the last ninety days, and Tehran Index does not publish a rate for a period that recent. The rial and toman figures are the finding.

Cite as: Tehran Index, “Iran’s Listed Payment Processors Sell More Airtime Than Payments”, 3 October 2026. Revenue lines from six monthly activity reports filed to Codal for the month ended 22 September 2026, tracing numbers 1600595, 1602077, 1605656, 1605535, 1600991 and 1605298, read directly. Audited margin figures from the audited interim statements of Parsian E-Commerce. Sector share and registry counts computed by Tehran Index on 2 October 2026, denominators stated in-line. tehranindex.com