Iran’s Largest Mobile Operator Built a Startup Portfolio Without Spending Cash

In August this desk wrote about Harkat Aval, the venture arm of Hamrah-e Aval, using nothing but a Farsi web page listing sixteen companies. That was all there was. It turns out there was a great deal more, filed twice a year for six years, sitting on Codal under somebody else’s ticker.

Hamrah-e Aval, also called MCI, is Iran’s largest mobile network operator and trades on the Tehran Stock Exchange. It files financial statements on Codal for eleven of its subsidiaries as well as for itself, and Harkat Aval is one of the eleven, which is why the arm’s accounts appear under the parent’s symbol rather than its own. The filings record Harkat Aval’s own issuer status as not registered with the securities regulator. It publishes these statements because its shareholder has to.

Thirteen such letters are on the file, two a year going back to the six months ended 20 June 2020. We read the two most recent end to end and took the dates from the rest. Those two give the venture arm of Iran’s largest mobile operator a balance sheet, a profit and loss account and a cash flow statement covering two and a half years, from 22 December 2023 to 21 June 2026. As far as we can establish, none of it has been read in English.

Why these accounts exist at all

The audit opinion on the year to 21 December 2025 is clean. The Audit Organization, the state auditor, states that the statements present the financial position and cash flows fairly in all material respects, with no qualification, no emphasis of matter and no going concern paragraph. The review conclusion on the six months to 21 June 2026 is likewise unmodified. That matters for what follows: everything below is not an allegation about the numbers, it is the numbers, and a state auditor has signed them.

One paragraph of that audit report does useful work later. Acting as statutory inspector, the auditor reports on the transactions caught by article 129 of the Commercial Code and records that they were carried out on the basis of the relationships between the companies of the Mobile Communication Company of Iran group. That is the filing’s own statement that this vehicle transacts inside its group.

The portfolio went up six times and no cash went out

Read the long-term investments row first. In the year to 20 December 2024 it went from 865.0 billion toman to 5,237.7 billion toman, an increase of 4,372.8 billion toman and a multiple of 6.06. That is the year of the transaction the Persian press called the largest investment in the history of Iran’s digital economy, and it is the only period in this series where the portfolio moves by more than three percent.

Now read the cash flow statement for the same year. Under payments to acquire long-term investments it prints zero. Under receipts from the sale of long-term investments it prints zero as well. The portfolio grew six times over and not one rial of cash left the company to buy it.

The balance sheet says where it came from. Trade and other payables rose from 797.7 billion toman to 5,029.0 billion toman in the same year, an increase of 4,231.3 billion. That is 141.4 billion toman less than the increase in the portfolio, a gap of 3.2 percent. There is no bank debt: the financial facilities line is zero in every period column of both filings we read. At that year end the vehicle’s own equity was 723.6 billion toman against a balance sheet of 5,759.4 billion, so 12.6 percent of it was equity. Most of the rest was a payable which, on the auditor’s own statement above, sits inside the operator’s group.

The arm did not raise a fund. It ran a tab with its parent.

Then the tab became share capital

In the following year, to 21 December 2025, share capital rose from 492.0 billion toman to 3,000.0 billion toman, an increase of 2,508.0 billion. Trade and other payables fell by 2,025.9 billion over the same twelve months. The financing section of the cash flow statement reports no cash received from a capital increase: that line is zero.

One more figure sits in the same statement and we are going to state it without explaining it. In the investing section, cash received from dividends in that year is 2,508.0 billion toman. That is the capital increase to the rial, the same 25,080,000 million rial on both. Cash used in operations in the same year was negative 2,316.1 billion toman. The note that reconciles these movements is an attachment we could not open, and we are not going to invent the mechanism that connects three numbers this close together. We publish the identity and leave it open.

What the year did produce in cash going the other way is small and specific: dividends paid of 146.0 billion toman, against 0.36 billion the year before. A further 89.0 billion sat as a dividend payable at 21 June 2026.

There is almost no money in it

At 21 December 2025 this vehicle held 15.9 billion toman of cash against total assets of 6,210.1 billion. That is 0.257 percent. The year before it held 15.9 billion, and the year before that 15.5 billion. The cash line is close to motionless while the portfolio around it multiplies by six.

By 21 June 2026 it had improved to 48.3 billion toman, 0.743 percent of assets, and that half year is the first of the four periods we read with positive operating cash flow, at 20.8 billion toman. It is still not a cash balance that funds anything.

This is the substantive finding for anyone modelling Iranian venture capital from outside. A vehicle like this has no committed capital, no dry powder and no fund life. It is a line on its parent’s balance sheet that happens to have its own registration. When it invests, the group pays, and the payment shows up as a payable rather than as a drawdown. Counting it as a fund, and counting its portfolio as deployed capital of the kind an outside allocator would recognise, imports an assumption these statements do not support.

It is worth setting that against the other Iranian vehicles whose audited numbers this desk has read. The listed venture funds are registered funds with unit holders, and their auditors print an investee note that names companies and gives their revenue and net result. This one is a subsidiary. It prints a balance sheet and no investee note we can reach. Two disclosure regimes, two completely different things visible, and the larger investor is the one that shows less.

The book is a record of what was paid, not of what it is worth

The number most readers will want from this piece is the one it cannot give them. The portfolio is carried at 5,436.0 billion toman at 21 June 2026. At the auditor-reviewed rate MTN’s interim notes imply for 30 June 2026, 145,793 toman to the dollar, that is about $37.3 million. At the Tehran Index daily free-market rate for 1 July 2026, the first capture in our own series after the balance sheet date, it is about $31.2 million. Two dated, defensible rates, ten days apart, nineteen percent apart in the rate and so in the answer.

Neither figure is a valuation of anything. Three things in the statements indicate a book held at cost rather than marked to a market. The statement of changes in equity carries a revaluation surplus line and it is zero in every period shown. The portfolio moved 2.6 percent in the year to 21 December 2025 and 1.2 percent in the six months after it, 63.7 billion toman, in an economy MTN’s auditors have formally classified as hyperinflationary since 1 January 2020. And the cash flow statement records no cash in and no cash out of long-term investments in any of the four periods we read, so the small movements are not purchases. The note that would state the measurement basis is unread, so this is our inference from the face of the statements, labelled as one.

Our own August piece on this investor derived, from an announced valuation and an announced percentage, an implied 12,000 billion toman for a single stake, and labelled that arithmetic as ours at every appearance. The entire investment book here is carried at less than half of it. That is not a contradiction and nobody should report it as one. It is the difference between a headline transaction valuation and a historical cost, and this filing is the first time an Iranian investor has published the second kind of number at all. It is also why the conversion problem bites domestic investors and foreign ones differently: a cost book in toman never has to answer the question at all.

It does make money

Operating revenue in the six months to 21 June 2026 was 311.5 billion toman, against 174.2 billion for the whole preceding year and 33.6 billion in the comparable half year. Net profit for the six months was 217.3 billion toman, more than either full year in the series: 111.5 billion in the year to 21 December 2025 and 208.2 billion in the year to 20 December 2024. Operating profit was 243.0 billion against a loss of 13.5 billion in the comparable half.

Two cautions on that. Receivables rose 209.9 billion toman over the same six months, so most of the revenue was booked rather than collected. And no dividend cash was received in the half at all, which means this revenue is not portfolio distributions. The filings carry a cost of revenue line, which a pure holding company would not, so there is an operating business inside this vehicle that the statements do not break out.

Who sits on it

The board sheet in the filing lists five corporate directors and every one of them is an MCI group company: the operator itself as chairman, and four subsidiaries, every one of which files its own financial statements on the same Codal list under the same parent symbol. That is how we checked them. Establishing which entity is which was the precaution this research was queued with, and it holds: those are sister companies of Harkat Aval, not other names for it.

One director is worth naming because two independent records meet on him. The Digikala record on this site carries the group board as recorded in the corporate registry gazette after the September 2024 election, and it names Mohammad-Mahdi Abbaskhani as chairman of Digikala Group, sitting as the representative of Harkat Aval. Codal’s board sheet on the August 2026 filing shows the same man on Harkat Aval’s own board, as the representative of one of the sister subsidiaries. The link between the two companies is not our inference. It sits on two separate public records, two years apart.

What we do not know

Which investments make up the book. This is the large one. The notes to the financial statements, notes 1 to 32 according to the audit report, are a separate PDF attachment on Codal. The in-app browser would not open the download route and the spreadsheet export is blocked to the page. So no investee is named anywhere above, and we do not assert that the stake behind the 2024 step-up sits on this balance sheet rather than on the parent’s. Anyone who opens that attachment should get the portfolio schedule, with cost and carrying value per company, which is the disclosure this whole subject is missing.

The measurement basis. Same cause. We infer cost from the behaviour of the statements and say so; we have not read the accounting policy note.

The two exits. Harkat Aval’s own portfolio page marks two of its sixteen entries with the Farsi word for exit. The cash flow statements record no cash received from the sale of a long-term investment in any of the four periods we read. The portfolio page carries no dates, so we cannot say whether those exits fall inside this window or before it, and we are not treating the zero as evidence about them.

The identity. A capital increase and a dividend receipt of exactly the same amount in the same year, with no cash recorded against the first, is a structure the notes would explain in a sentence. Stated above, unexplained, deliberately.

The other eleven letters. We opened two of the thirteen. The rest carry balance sheets running back to 2020 that nobody has read, covering the years before this vehicle did anything large.

Our own gap. Tehran Index tracks 17 investors in Iran’s innovation economy and Harkat Aval is still not one of them. That row has been owed since 18 August 2026. Of the 918 public facts on our 376 public company records, 18 touch a balance sheet and every one of them sits on an operating company rather than on an investor. Of the sixteen positions the arm discloses, 7 have a record here and 9 do not, unchanged in a month. The one Iranian investor with six years of filed accounts in public is the one we have no record for.

Registered capital of 4,920,000 million rial appears in the Codal masthead on both filings while the balance sheet inside shows share capital of 30,000,000 million rial from the year to 21 December 2025 onward. The masthead is the last figure registered with the index, not the current one. Registered capital is a nominal legal figure in any case, it carries no conversion, and it is not a valuation.

Cite as: Tehran Index, “Iran’s Largest Mobile Operator Built a Startup Portfolio Without Spending Cash”, 15 September 2026. All company figures from the financial statements of شرکت کسب و کارهای نوپای حرکت اول filed on Codal under the symbol همراه by ارتباطات سيار ايران: the reviewed interim statements for the six months ended 21 June 2026, tracing number 1585937, published 20 August 2026, and the audited annual statements for the year ended 21 December 2025, tracing number 1489580, published 17 February 2026. Both read in full on 15 September 2026. The filing history of eleven further letters, the earliest for the six months ended 20 June 2020, is from a search of the parent’s Codal letters on the same day; those eleven were not opened. Amounts are published by the filer in million rial and are shown here in billion toman at 1 toman to 10 rial. Dollar equivalents apply only to the 21 June 2026 balance sheet, at the auditor-reviewed rate MTN’s interim notes imply for 30 June 2026 and at the Tehran Index daily free-market series for 1 July 2026, each named at the point of use. The notes to the financial statements were not readable and no investee is named. Registry counts n=403 records, 376 public, 918 public facts, 17 investor entities, queried 15 September 2026. No valuation of any private Iranian company appears here.