Tehran, Iran, November 5
By Mehdi Sepahvand - Trend:
Based on newly released data, it appears that only three percent of cellphones on sale in Iranian shops are legal.
A recent report says that of all cellphones in the Iranian market, only 10 percent are legal, that is, their tariffs are paid at the customhouse.
Also, it is said that of the legal phones, 70 percent is sold online. That leaves a meager three percent to be sold at shops.
Alaeddin is the most famous market for cellphones in Iran, situated in downtown Tehran. Around this building and on the pavement, there are tens of vendors who sell smuggled cellphones, many of which are replica of famous brand models.
"We get the phones from middlemen and do not know exactly how they acquire them. We hear most of them are brought into Iran from western borders by men who carry them in great loads on their backs," a vendor identifying himself as Hamid said.
Trend found out that these vendors only accept cash in order to ensure they would not be tracked down.
GFK (Growth from Knowledge, a market research and user experience research group) recently said that in the summer this year, each month about 630,000 cellphones were sold in Iran. Accordingly, only about 63,000 of them were legal.
Of this summer’s sales, Samsung claimed the greatest share (51), followed by Apple (30 percent), LG (10 percent), Huawei (8 percent), Sony (3 percent), HTC (2 percent), and others (2 percent).
Iran recently launched a long-awaited national scheme to curb the huge and growing market for smuggled cellphones.
Under the scheme, cellphone users in the country need to register their devices with the country’s telecommunications user database.
Meanwhile, Iran Customs Administration has imposed a 5-percent customs duty on the imports of cellphones. The importers of cellphones also need to pay the 9-percent value added tax (VAT).
According to the media reports, those devices not registered with the database will be considered contraband and will be rendered unusable in the country.
According to Iranian officials 12.5 million cell phone devices are smuggled into the country depriving the government of $350 million in tax revenues.
The officials have estimated that worth of $2.5 billion of phone devices are smuggled into the country per year.
The annual demand for phone devices in the Iranian market is reportedly about 14 million.