Iran’s Used-Car Platform Multiplied Its Money Ten Times. Not Its Cars.

Almost no Iranian marketplace publishes the money. It publishes growth rates, user counts, order counts and award photographs, and a reader who wants to know how large the business actually is has to guess. One used-car platform has published the number four years running, in four annual reports nobody appears to have read in English. Read as a run, the four reports say something the company does not: the money multiplied, and the cars did not.

Hamrah Mechanic began as a mobile car-inspection service, sending an inspector to look at a used car before someone bought it, and later added an online showroom where inspected cars are listed, a price-estimation tool, instalment finance from 2021, and physical branches, the first of which opened in the year to 19 March 2024. It publishes an annual report on its own year and on Iran’s car market. Tehran Index holds four of them, covering the years to 20 March 2023, 19 March 2024, 20 March 2025 and 20 March 2026. All four are image-only files with no usable text layer, which is part of why they have stayed unread outside Iran, and every figure below was read from the page image rather than from extracted text.

The number almost nobody prints

Start with why this run is worth reading at all. Across the 385 public company records and 4,018 public facts in the Tehran Index registry, re-queried on 20 October 2026, three records carry an absolute money value, for a named year, of what changed hands on the company’s own platform. Not the company’s revenue, which is a different and much smaller thing. The value of the goods.

They are Hamrah Mechanic, Karnameh and Tapsi. Tapsi’s is there because Tapsi is listed on Iran Fara Bourse and files its accounts on Codal: the notes to its statements for the year to 20 March 2026 say the total value of trips completed in the year was 185,621 billion rial. The other two publish voluntarily, and both of them sell used cars.

The absences are louder than the presences. Digikala, Iran’s largest e-commerce platform, has published growth rates for its merchandise value in every report this desk holds, back to a series covering the eight years to 19 March 2020, and has never published the level. Our own record on it carries a fact whose entire content is that sentence. Snapp’s equivalent row reads “Not disclosed”. Karnameh names a gross merchandise value in its report for the year to 19 March 2024, says it grew 244 per cent, and does not print what it grew to.

In a market where the currency moves faster than the business, a growth rate without a level is not a disclosure. It is a decoration.

Ten times the money in three years

The company’s transaction value runs 1,200 billion toman for the year to 20 March 2023, 2,166 for the year to 19 March 2024, 4,366 for the year to 20 March 2025 and 12,100, or 12.1 hemat as the newest report prints it, for the year to 20 March 2026. That is 10.1 times in three years. For scale, and in the same currency and the same year, Tapsi’s filed total trip value was 18,562 billion toman: the used-car platform moved 65 per cent of what Iran’s one listed ride-hailing company moved in fares.

Now the other side of the same four reports. In the year to 19 March 2024 car sellers registered nearly 200,000 requests to sell a car on the platform. In the year to 20 March 2025 they registered 180,000. In the year to 20 March 2026 they registered more than 156,000. Down 10 per cent, then down 13 per cent, a fall of 22 per cent over the two years in which the money rose 5.6 times.

Listings behave differently from requests, and they should: the platform screens what it publishes. Published listings went from more than 10,000 in the year to 20 March 2023 to 31,629 in the year to 20 March 2025 and more than 48,000 in the year to 20 March 2026, a rise of at least 52 per cent in the last year alone. Put the money over the listings and the value of a published listing goes from 138.0 million toman to at most 252.1 million, which is a rise of at most 1.83 times against transaction value up 2.77 times. Both of those are Tehran Index arithmetic on the company’s printed figures, and the second is a ceiling because 48,000 is a floor. A listing is not a sale, so this is not an average car price. It is the clearest available statement that most of what grew was price.

Everything else in the reports points the same way. Unique users went from 27 million in the year to 19 March 2024 to more than 37 million in the year to 20 March 2026, a rise of about 37 per cent. Listing views went from 105 million to more than 117 million over the last year, a rise of 11 per cent. Inspections went from more than 70,000 to more than 80,000. The audience grew moderately, the inventory grew moderately, the sellers thinned, and the money went up ten times.

The growth figure changed meaning between two reports

There is a trap in reading these reports off their headline blocks, and it is worth setting out because it will catch anyone who builds a series from the percentages instead of the levels.

The report for the year to 19 March 2024 prints “80 per cent growth in transaction volume”, and 2,166 against 1,200 is an increase of 80.5 per cent. The report for the year to 20 March 2025 prints “101 per cent”, and 4,366 against 2,166 is an increase of 101.6 per cent. Both are increments, and both check out. The newest report, under the same heading, prints “281 per cent”. Twelve point one divided by four point three is 281 per cent. As an increase, 12,100 against 4,366 is 177 per cent.

So the third figure is a ratio where the first two were increments. We are not calling that an error, because a company is entitled to print either and the levels beside it are unambiguous. We are saying that the only safe way to read this sector is off the levels, and that a reader who strings the three headline percentages together gets a number the company’s own figures do not support.

The rival prints three different numbers for the same market

Karnameh, the other voluntary publisher, makes the point harder. Its report for the year to 20 March 2023 prints 19.5 thousand billion toman as the value of car transactions it took part in through its inspection, buying-assistant and selling-assistant services. Its report for the following year, to 19 March 2024, prints 2.8 thousand billion toman as the value of cars transacted by Karnameh in Tehran, and on a page two leaves later prints 49.4 thousand billion toman as the value of cars it inspected in Tehran. Those last two are 17.6 times apart and sit in the same document.

None of the three is wrong. They are three different questions: deals I was present at, deals I did, cars I looked at. But they are published under labels similar enough that the first two read like a series running backwards, and no reader working from the headline numbers alone would know they are not. Karnameh is the second of the two companies in this entire registry that print a level at all, and it has not printed the same measure twice.

What the physical operators publish instead

Khodro45 runs the opposite business model. Where Hamrah Mechanic lists cars it has inspected, Khodro45 takes them in: its own eight-year report, covering to 20 March 2026, records 67 branches in 24 cities, 106,801 cars received at those branches in the year, 258,928 cars inspected across eight years, 60,752 verified buyers in 77 cities, and a transport fleet that drove 16,825,695 kilometres in the year. It publishes no money figure at all. The operator that physically handled 106,801 cars in a year says nothing about their value; the operator that published more than 48,000 listings in the same year published 12,100 billion toman.

One rung further out sits Bama, a pure classified site, which for the year to 20 March 2022 published more than 1,100,000 unique cars listed, 81 per cent of them placed by private sellers, and more than 100 staff. No money there either. That report is four years older than the others and nothing here is compared across those years. The structural point stands on its own: the further a platform sits from the transaction, the more cars it counts and the less it says about what they were worth.

Why no dollar figure appears in this note

Tehran Index does not convert these figures, and here the refusal is doing real work rather than observing a house rule. The whole finding is that a nominal toman series rose much faster than the physical activity underneath it. Converting that series at any rate would answer the question the piece is asking, using a number the desk will not publish. The figures stay in toman, exactly as the companies printed them, and the comparison that carries the scale is to another Iranian company in the same currency in the same year.

What we do not know

We do not know what the company counts as a transaction. None of the four reports defines “value of transactions on the platform”, and whether it includes branch sales, instalment purchases financed by third parties, or deals merely brokered is not stated. We know instalment purchases are inside it, because the newest report prints 3.4 hemat of instalment transactions against the 12.1 total, and the year before printed 1,980 against 4,366; the instalment share therefore fell from 45 per cent to 28 per cent, which is a shift nobody has explained.

We do not know how many cars were actually sold in any of these years. No report in the run prints a count of completed transactions, which is why the value per listing above is a ratio of two published numbers and not an average price. We do not know the company’s revenue or profit in any year: all four reports give growth rates for both and none gives a level, which is the same gap the piece opens by describing. We do not know whether the fall in sale requests is sellers leaving, a change in how a request is counted, or deliberate filtering at the top of the funnel, and the reports say nothing about it. And we have no audited figure for any company in this note except Tapsi, because none of the others is listed.

This is what four of a company’s own reports say when they are laid side by side. It is also, as far as this desk can establish, the only multi-year platform transaction series published by any Iranian marketplace. That is the finding, and the reason it is a finding is the problem.

Related: Digikala’s Baskets Have Shrunk for Four Years. Its Report Says They Grew., on a company whose own chart contradicts its own words; Iran’s Biggest App Store Published the Money for Five Years. Then It Stopped., on a disclosure that ended; and Iran’s Instagram Shops Are as Large as Its E-Commerce Platforms, on the denominator all of this sits inside.

Cite as: Tehran Index, “Iran’s Used-Car Platform Multiplied Its Money Ten Times. Not Its Cars.”, 20 October 2026. Transaction, listing and sale-request figures from Hamrah Mechanic’s own annual reports for the years to 20 March 2023, 19 March 2024, 20 March 2025 and 20 March 2026, read as page images on 20 October 2026. Karnameh figures from its own reports for the years to 20 March 2023 and 19 March 2024. Khodro45 figures from its own eight-year report to 20 March 2026 and Bama figures from its own report for the year to 20 March 2022. Tapsi trip value from the notes to its financial statements for the year to 20 March 2026, filed on Codal. Registry counts computed from the Tehran Index company registry on 20 October 2026. tehranindex.com