TEHRAN: The legal import of cell phones in Iran has increased by 104.4 percent after the administration launched a plan to prevent smuggling cell phones into the country recently.
Under the plan, cell phone users in the country need to register their devices with the country’s telecommunications user database.
Iran imported 2.192 million cell phones during the current fiscal year (March 20-Jan. 5), meanwhile the figure was 1.07 million in the same period of the preceding year, according to the country’s Customs Administration. The value of the cell phone imports also witnessed a rise by 96.3 percent to $321.63 million in the period.
GFK (Growth from Knowledge, a market research and user experience research group) recently stated that in the summer of this year, about 630,000 cell phones are sold in Iran each month. Accordingly, only about 63,000 of them legal.
Of this summer’s sales, Samsung claimed the greatest share (51 percent), followed by Apple (30 percent), LG (10 percent), Huawei (8 percent), Sony (3 percent), HTC (2 percent), and others (2 percent).
The annual demand for phone devices in the Iranian market is reportedly about 9 million.
