The Armenian government’s State Revenue Committee (SRC) collected about 77.8 billion drams ($204 million) in various taxes from the company, Mobile Center, up from 66.7 billion drams in 2024.
Mobile Center paid more taxes than Armenia’s largest cigarette manufacturer and mining enterprise that are second and third respectively on the 2025 list of the country’s leading corporate taxpayers released by the SRC.
The Zangezur Copper-Molybdenum Combine, which employes some 4,000 people, had long topped the list. Its tax contributions to the state budget shrunk by almost half, to 52.1 billion drams, in 2025 despite a sizable rise in the international price of copper.
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.
According to the Armenian customs service, the South Caucasus nation exported $332 million worth of mobile phones and $100 million worth of TV sets in the first half of 2025 despite not manufacturing such items. The lucrative re-exports have been the main driving force behind the Armenian economy’s robust growth registered since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine.
In 2023-2024, Armenia also became a key conduit for large-scale exports of Russian gold and diamonds to world markets and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in particular. Russia remained Armenia’s by far the impost important trading partner even after the re-export of Russian gold, worth billions of dollars, shrunk dramatically last year.