Mohammad Rezvanifar said on Tuesday that revenues delivered by IRICA to the Iranian treasury department in March-August had reached a total of 610 trillion rials ($1.25 billion).
Rezvanifar said the surge in customs revenues had come despite new import duty exemptions applied to some basic goods like medicine.
The finance ministry official said Iran’s customs income had reached 1,580 trillion rials in the calendar year to late March, making it the third largest source of revenues for the government after oil export and tax.
He also revealed some details about Iran’s non-oil trade performance in the five months to late August, saying the country had exported a total of $18.7 billion worth of commodities over the period, down 8% year on year.
Rezvanifar said the main cause of the fall in export revenues this year is the decline in global prices of petrochemical products which account for a bulk of Iranian overseas shipments.
He said imports into Iran had increased by 8.7% year on year in March-August to reach $23.4 billion, adding that cargo transit via Iran had risen by 2.7% in volume terms over the same period.
Iran has increasingly relied on trade income, including customs and transit revenues, as part of a policy introduced in recent years to diversify the economy away from oil.
Iran’s foreign trade reached a total of $113 billion last calendar year with exports hitting a milestone figure of $53 billion, up 10% from the year before.
MNA/PressTV