Snapp carried 1.83 times Lyft's trips. Then its growth stalled.

In the year to 20 March 2025, Snapp’s ride-hailing service carried 1,513,844,390 trips in 424 cities and towns, by the company’s own annual report. Lyft, which operates in the United States and Canada, carried 828 million rides in calendar 2024, by its own full-year results. Snapp’s count is 1.83 times Lyft’s. Per head the gap is wider: 16.5 trips for every person in Iran, against 2.2 rides for every person in the United States and Canada together. On an average day of that year Snapp carried about 4.14 million trips.

That is the number that will be repeated. The more useful finding sits in the same company’s own reports, read across five editions: the growth that produced it has almost stopped. In the year to 20 March 2026 Snapp’s trip count rose 0.8 percent, while the number of active driver accounts rose 6.1 percent. This piece sets out how that figure is reached, how far it can be trusted, and what it does and does not say about the company.

Five years, in the company’s own count

Snapp publishes an annual report each spring for the Iranian year that ends in late March. Read in sequence, the editions give a clean series. Ride-hailing trips were 820,089,647 in the year to 20 March 2022; 1,095,116,350 in the year to 20 March 2023, up 33.5 percent; 1,376,011,494 in the year to 19 March 2024, up 25.7 percent; and 1,513,844,390 in the year to 20 March 2025, up 10.0 percent (the report prints 10.01). The editions reconcile with each other: the cumulative totals and printed year-on-year increases match the annual figures to the trip, with one exception of 10,992 trips noted under the chart. That is why we treat them as one series.

The figure for the year to 20 March 2026 is not printed. It is derived, and the derivation is ours. The company’s announcement for that year gives a cumulative total of 7,960,133,547 trips from 21 March 2018 to the end of that year. Its report for the year to 19 March 2024 gives the cumulative total to that date: 4,920,441,624. Subtract that, and subtract the 1,513,844,390 of the year to 20 March 2025, and what remains is 1,525,847,533 trips.

A derived figure needs an independent check, and the latest report supplies one. It prints 331,933,925 trips in Tehran for the year to 20 March 2026 and calls that about 21.76 percent of Snapp’s intra-city trips. That implies about 1,525,431,641 in all, within 0.03 percent of the derived total. Two separate routes through the company’s own numbers arrive at the same place.

One calendar detail works in the company’s favour. The year to 20 March 2025 had 366 days and the year after had 365, so on a per-day basis the latest year grew about 1.1 percent rather than 0.8. Either way, growth went from a third a year to a tenth to approximately nothing in three steps.

More drivers, fewer trips each

The supply side kept growing after the trips did not. Active driver accounts were 3,305,147 in the year to 19 March 2024, 3,692,657 a year later (up 11.7 percent) and 3,919,000 in the year to 20 March 2026 (up 6.1 percent). Trips per active driver account fell from 416 to 410 to 389, a decline of 6.5 percent over two years. Active passenger accounts followed the same shape: 31,929,588, then 35,657,967, then 37,874,564, with trips per account easing from 43.1 to 42.5 to 40.3.

Read plainly, the platform kept adding people on both sides and each of them used it a little less. The reports also count 424 cities and towns served in the year to March 2025 and 751 by the end of the year to March 2026, on the same printed wording. We have not established that the two counts use one definition, so we do not build on the comparison; if they do, the footprint widened sharply while the trip count stood still. None of this is evidence of distress. It is evidence that the easy volume has been taken, and that whatever grows Snapp from here is not more of the same.

Against Lyft, with the caveats in the text

Lyft is the fair comparison for a reason that has nothing to do with prestige: it is a ride-hailing company concentrated in one region that publishes an annual ride count and an annual rider count. In 2024 it reported 828 million rides and 44 million annual riders, which is 18.8 rides per rider. Snapp’s 1,513,844,390 trips across 35,657,967 active passenger accounts is 42.5 trips per account. On every measure Snapp carries more, and per head of population it carries about 7.6 times as much.

Four caveats belong next to those numbers, not beneath them. Accounts are not people: one person can hold more than one Snapp passenger or driver account, so every per-account figure overstates use per person by an amount the reports do not disclose. The years are offset: Snapp’s year begins in late March, about 11 weeks after Lyft’s calendar year. The markets differ in kind: Lyft competes with Uber in its home market, and the per-person figures divide by whole national populations, not by the people either service actually reaches. And the direction differs: Lyft reported 945.5 million rides for 2025, up 14 percent, and 51.3 million annual riders, while Snapp’s derived count for the year to March 2026 rose 0.8 percent. On those two later figures Snapp’s lead narrows to about 1.6 times. We have not established whether Lyft’s 2025 count includes any business outside the United States and Canada, so we compute no per-person figure for it.

Uber is a scale reference, not a peer. It reported 11,273 million trips in 2024, but that count includes deliveries as well as rides, across all its markets. It is about 7.4 times Snapp’s ride-hailing count and says nothing about either company’s position at home.

What the year to 20 March 2026 held

The flat year was not an ordinary one. It contained the twelve days of conflict from 13 to 24 June 2025, the nationwide internet shutdown of January 2026, and the conflict that began on 28 February 2026, three weeks before the year closed. Our earlier pieces, Snapp’s 2025-26: The Resilience Numbers and Six Iranian Companies Measured the Same Twelve Days, set out what those weeks did to trading across the sector.

The context matters, but it is context. Snapp’s reports do not apportion the slowdown among causes, and neither do we. Growth had already fallen from 25.7 percent to 10.0 percent in the year before any of those events, so a reader who assigns the whole of the latest year to war and shutdown is making an assumption the company has not made. One flat year, derived rather than printed, also does not establish a trend. The next annual report will.

What the reports leave out

Snapp discloses no fares, no revenue, no take rate and no margins for ride-hailing, so none appears here and none is estimated. A flat trip count tells a reader nothing about whether income rose or fell over the same year. The reports also give no count of unique people, on either side of the market.

We also leave out a figure the reports do print. Passenger hours fell from 614,080,723 in the year to 20 March 2025 to 407,554,545 in the year after, while distance travelled rose 3.9 percent. Divided through, that is an average trip speed of 21.1 km/h one year and 33.1 km/h the next. City traffic does not change that much in a year, so one of the two hours figures is very likely a different measure. Until the source passage is re-read, the record does not chart it.

What a buyer of Iran exposure should take from it

Snapp carries more trips in a year than a US-listed ride-hailing company, and it reports that volume in enough detail to be checked against itself. Both things are worth knowing. So is the turn: the volume engine that carried the company through five years is no longer the engine of growth, and the reports that show it leave out the financial figures that would say what it means for value. Anyone pricing an Iranian platform on volume alone is pricing the part that has stopped growing.

The free Snapp record carries every figure above with its source passage. For buyers who need more, Tehran Index sells a full company dossier for USD 3,000, and a registry check of who legally owns and runs an Iranian company, from the Official Gazette, for USD 750.

Cite as: Tehran Index, “Snapp carried 1.83 times Lyft’s trips. Then its growth stalled.”, 7 October 2026. Snapp figures from the company’s own reports as recorded in the Tehran Index facts layer; the figure for the year to 20 March 2026 derived by Tehran Index from two printed cumulative totals. tehranindex.com