Iran's Second Mobile Operator Reports Its Numbers in Johannesburg

Irancell publishes no revenue, no profit and no balance sheet. All of it is filed twice a year in South Africa, audited and in English, because a JSE-listed company owns 49 percent of it. That filing also carries three accounting facts about Iran that exist in no Iranian source, including a company that keeps two year-ends. Of the 370 companies in the Tehran Index registry, two have a shareholder that files on a stock exchange, and it is the same shareholder for both.

Irancell is Iran’s second-largest mobile operator by subscribers. It publishes no revenue figure, no profit figure, no margin and no balance sheet. Ask the Tehran Index record what the company earns and the honest answer is a gaps row: revenue and profit, not disclosed.

All of those numbers exist. They are audited, they are in English, and they are filed twice a year in Johannesburg, because a company listed on the JSE owns 49 percent of Irancell and has to account for it.

The operator does not report. Its shareholder does.

MTN Group holds 49 percent of Irancell and accounts for it as a joint venture under the equity method. That accounting treatment carries an obligation: MTN has to tell its own shareholders how the asset is performing. So a set of Irancell operating figures appears in MTN’s results, reviewed or audited by Ernst & Young Inc., every six months.

For the six months to 30 June 2025, MTN reported it plainly. Irancell increased service revenue by 22.6 percent, the EBITDA margin rose 2.6 percentage points to 44.0 percent, and equity-accounted profits rose 29.9 percent. Every one of those is a constant-currency figure, which is MTN’s own convention and matters enormously later. In the same document, Iran appears in the net debt table with cash of 958 million rand against interest-bearing liabilities of 1,517 million, for net debt of 559 million, up from 395 million at 31 December 2024.

Three accounting facts that exist in no Iranian source

The interesting part of the filing is not the growth rate. It is the machinery around it, because that machinery is invisible anywhere else in English.

Irancell keeps two year-ends.MTN’s audited directors’ report for the year ended 31 December 2025 states it exactly: “All Group entities have a year-end consistent with that of the Company with the exception of Irancell, a joint venture of the Group that has a year-end of 21 December for Group reporting purposes and a statutory year-end of 21 March.” The statutory date is the close of the Iranian financial year. The 21 December date exists so a South African group can consolidate on a calendar basis. Anyone comparing an Irancell number to an Iranian peer’s number is comparing two different twelve-month windows, and the gap is three months.

Iran has been accounted for as hyperinflationary since 1 January 2020.MTN’s interim results say so directly: the economy of Iran was assessed to be hyperinflationary effective that date and hyperinflation accounting has been applied since. In practice that means the local figures are restated for changes in purchasing power before they are translated into rand. It is a formal accounting designation, applied by an audited multinational, and it is the single most consequential technical fact for anyone reading an Iranian corporate number and assuming it behaves like a normal one.

Iran is inside the group and outside every headline.MTN puts Iran in its Middle East and North Africa region, then removes it: Iran forms part of the region “geographically and operationally” but is excluded from the regional results because it is equity accounted. The net debt table makes the point visually. Iran gets its own line, printed underneath the row marked Total. It is a real asset with a real balance sheet, reported beneath the sum of everything else.

Growing and marked down are the same story

Every Irancell figure above carries an asterisk in the original, because every one of them is constant currency. Put the reported number next to it and the sign flips. MTN’s total contribution from associates and joint ventures for the six months to 30 June 2025 was 1.7 billion rand, down 10.9 percent as reported and up 50.0 percent in constant currency, in the same sentence, in the same document. The business did one thing. The translated number did the opposite.

That is the argument Iran’s Exit Problem Is an Exchange Rate Problemmade from one Swedish investor’s audited euro marks, and what is new here is the corroboration. That piece rested on a single small holder that is OTC traded. This is a JSE-listed multinational reporting in rand, on a different asset, reaching the same place.

The cash side sharpens it. MTN’s audited cash flow statement for 2025 shows dividends received from joint ventures of 120 million rand, against 84 million in 2024. That is every joint venture in the group, not Iran alone. Equity-accounted profit is an accounting entitlement to a share of earnings. It is not the same thing as money arriving. MTN has said, in statements reported through 2025 and 2026, that it has neither taken capital or dividends out of the Iran business nor put capital into it since May 2018. We have not located that sentence inside a filing we read, so it is carried here as MTN’s reported position rather than as a quotation from the accounts.

On 11 August 2026 MTN issued a trading statement flagging impairment losses of 213 cents a share relating to its Iran operations, against 104 cents in the first half of 2025, as reported by TechCentral and TechCabal the same day. Full interim results are due on or about 24 August 2026. Tehran Index will read the statements rather than the coverage.

The same filing is the only audited window on Snapp

Go back to that 50 percent constant-currency rise and read who MTN says caused it. The contribution was “largely attributable to improved results from the Iran Internet Group (IIG) and USO adjustment”. Two drivers named, nothing else, and one of them is Iranian. IIG is the holding vehicle Snappoperates under, and MTN put the group’s Snapp stake at 43 percent in 2020, reported by Bloomberg at the time and never updated since.

Snapp publishes an enormous annual report full of trips, accounts and headcount, and no financial statements at all, which is why the resilience pieceis built on volumes rather than revenue. The only place a reader will find an audited statement that Snapp’s holding vehicle improved its results is a South African interim report.

Two of 370

Run it across the whole registry and the scarcity is the finding. Of the 370 companies on the Tehran Index public record, eight carry a foreign shareholder. Six of those eight point to the same Swedish investor, Pomegranate Investment, which is a public company traded over the counter and not listed on any exchange. The remaining two, Irancell and Snapp, point to MTN Group.

So exactly one shareholder in the entire registry files audited, exchange-regulated accounts, and the two companies it touches are Iran’s second mobile operator and its largest super-app. For an analyst, that is the whole map of externally audited visibility into Iran’s digital economy, and it fits on two lines.

This is a different count from the one in the exits census, and the two do not contradict each other. That piece scanned the registry for Iranian companies listed on a non-Iranian exchange and found none, which is still true. This one counts foreign shareholders that are themselves listed somewhere. No Iranian company files abroad. One of their owners does.

The contrast inside telecom is just as tight. Eight of the 370 are telecom companies. Hamrah-e Aval carries two published facts on our record and both are revenue, because it is listed in Tehran and files there. That is the point Iran Built a Startup Board. Almost Nobody Is On It. made about venues, running in the other direction: disclosure follows the listing, wherever the listing happens to be. And it closes the question the piece on Iran’s other operator left open, which covered MCI and said explicitly that the second operator was untouched.

What we do not know

The gaps are part of the record. We do not have a carrying value for Irancell on its own: MTN reports investment in associates and joint ventures at 24,094 million rand at 31 December 2025 against 23,691 million a year earlier, and that is every associate and joint venture in the group, not Iran. The note that would break it out was not reachable in the extraction this desk performed, and no Irancell-only figure is quoted anywhere above for that reason.

We do not have Irancell’s statutory accounts, only MTN’s 49 percent view of them, prepared under group accounting policies and to a 21 December year-end. We have not read MTN’s interim statements for the six months to 30 June 2026, which are not out yet. MTN’s share of Irancell’s 2025 earnings has been reported in dollars by third parties and we have not confirmed that figure in a filing, so it is not printed here.

And our own record disagrees with itself twice, which this piece found and is recording rather than quietly fixing. The Irancell fact row for the active base reads more than 69 million, sourced to the communications regulator through a secondary encyclopedia entry, while the entity note added by this desk on 18 August 2026 reads about 56 million. Neither is a company disclosure, which is why no subscriber count appears in the headline numbers above. Separately, the record carries two different names for the domestic holder of the other 51 percent of Irancell, one on the company row and another on the ownership fact. We publish both and assert neither until a registry-grade source settles it.

Snapp’s shareholder split has not been re-confirmed since 2020, and Iran Internet Group’s own ownership percentages have never been published. Tehran Index publishes no valuation of a private Iranian company, and nothing above is one.

Cite as: Tehran Index, “Iran’s Second Mobile Operator Reports Its Numbers in Johannesburg”, 21 August 2026. Operating and accounting figures from MTN Group Limited’s audited annual financial statements for the year ended 31 December 2025 and its externally reviewed financial results for the six months ended 30 June 2025. Shareholder and disclosure counts computed from the Tehran Index company registry, re-queried 21 August 2026, denominator 370 public company records. tehranindex.com