The Armenian government’s State Revenue Committee (SRC) collected about 33 billion drams ($86 million) in various taxes from the company, Mobile Center.
Mobile Center paid more taxes than Armenia’s natural gas distribution network, largest mining enterprise or any its fuel importers, telecommunication operators, tobacco firms and banks that have long been a key source of state revenue. It was second on the list of the country’s top corporate taxpayers last year, with the SRC reporting a 45 percent surge in the amount of taxes paid by it.
Mobile Center is an official distributor of the world’s leading smart phone manufacturers, notably Apple, Samsung and Xiaomi. It also sells computers and other electronics items.
The company belongs to the family of Samvel Aleksanian, one of Armenia’s wealthiest entrepreneurs who has wide-ranging business interests. Like many other Armenian firms and individual businesspeople, it has cashed in on Western bans on exports of various goods to Russia imposed after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Many such Western-made products, notably cars, cellphones and consumer electronics, have since been re-exported to Russia from Armenia. An Armenian electronics retailer, a company called Pretty Way, occupies nineth place in the SRC’s latest rankings, having paid 11.3 billion drams in taxes in January-June 2025.
The lucrative re-exports were the main driving force behind the Armenian economy’s robust growth in 2022 and 2023. The growth is expected to slow further this year due to a dwindling positive impact of the Western sanctions.
Separate data released by the Statistical Committee shows that Armenian exports shrunk by more than half, to about $3.8 billion, in the first half of 2025. The government agency also reported a nearly 39 percent year-on-year fall in imports.
Suren Parsian, a Yerevan-based economist, said the volume of foreign trade declined sharply because Armenia is no longer a conduit for large-scale exports of Russian gold and diamonds to world markets and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in particular.
“We can already state that the re-export of that gold was not a good thing for us, for our economy, but rather a bad thing because it had a negative impact, first of all, in terms of assessing the real state of foreign trade indicators,” Parsian told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service on Monday.
According to the Statistical Committee, Armenia’s trade with Russia, its leading commercial partner, shrunk to $2.8 billion in January-May 2025 from $6.7 billion in the year-earlier period.