Ten Companies, Half the Revenue: Inside Ethiopia's Tax Concentration Problem
Ten companies paid ETB 254.44 billion in FY2025/26, nearly half of Ethiopia's Large Taxpayers Branch revenue. Here's what the numbers reveal about Ethiopia's tax base.
Ethiopia's Ministry of Revenue collected ETB 522.67 billion from its largest taxpayers in the 2025/26 fiscal year. Ten companies out of 746 registered accounts paid ETB 254.44 billion of that total, or 48.71 percent. Ten entities, less than 1.5 percent of the taxpayer base, carried nearly half the load.
The figures were presented at Skylight Hotel by the Ministry's Large Taxpayers Branch Office, the unit that administers the country's biggest corporate accounts. The numbers describe a tax base that runs on a narrow set of engines, most of them owned by the state.
The Top Ten, By The Numbers
Ethio Telecom leads by a wide margin, paying ETB 65.84 billion, or 12.60 percent of the branch's entire annual take. That single company paid more in tax than the second and third-ranked firms combined.
- Ethio Telecom — ETB 65.84 billion
- Commercial Bank of Ethiopia — ETB 36.87 billion
- Ethiopian Airlines Group — ETB 30.87 billion
- Heineken Breweries Share Company — ETB 26.10 billion
- Ethiopian Shipping and Logistics — ETB 22.20 billion
- Ethiopian Electric Power — ETB 18.31 billion
- Awash Bank — ETB 15.77 billion
- Ethiopian Electric Utility — ETB 13.58 billion
- BGI Ethiopia — ETB 12.59 billion
- Ethiopian Roads Administration — ETB 12.33 billion
Eight of the ten are state-owned or government-linked entities. Only Heineken and Awash Bank sit outside that category, and Heineken itself is foreign-invested, not domestic.
What The Rest Of The Base Looks Like
The branch's own breakdown by ownership category makes the imbalance sharper. Thirty-one state-owned enterprises, just 4 percent of the 746 registered taxpayers, paid ETB 217.87 billion, or 42 percent of total revenue. Foreign direct investment firms, 127 of them, contributed ETB 102.24 billion, about 20 percent. Fifty banks and insurers added ETB 65.37 billion, 12 percent, a category that excludes the state-owned Commercial Bank of Ethiopia.
That leaves the domestic private sector: 532 companies, 71 percent of every registered large taxpayer, generating ETB 104.60 billion between them. That's also 20 percent of total revenue, the same share as the far smaller FDI bloc. Spread across 532 firms, the average domestic private company paid roughly 197 million birr for the year.
Put another way, 29 percent of the branch's taxpayers generated 80 percent of its revenue, while the remaining 71 percent produced only a fifth.
Awash Bank's Outsized Role
Awash Bank's ETB 15.77 billion is nearly 80 times the average contribution from a domestic private company in the same portfolio. Within the 532-firm private bloc, that single bank accounted for roughly 15 percent of everything the group paid combined.
The bank's tax bill also grew fast. It paid just over 10 billion birr in the 2024/25 fiscal year, meaning its contribution rose more than 50 percent in a single year. That growth tracks with the bank's broader financial performance: total assets reached 442.60 billion birr with net profit of 18.71 billion birr for the 2025 fiscal year, according to Aksion.ET.
Two other private banks, Bank of Abyssinia and Zemen Bank, also ranked among the sector's strongest contributors but neither cracked the overall top ten. That leaves Ethiopia's domestic private economy resting on essentially one fiscal pillar inside the country's most important tax bracket.
The Numbers Behind The Numbers
The Large Taxpayers Branch Office's ETB 522.67 billion sits inside a much larger national total. Ethiopia's Ministry of Revenue collected 1.518 trillion birr across the entire country in 2025/26, a 68.69 percent jump over the prior year. That puts the large taxpayer branch's haul at roughly 34 percent of everything the ministry collected nationwide, from just 746 accounts.
The target for next year raises the stakes further. The branch has been assigned a 2026/27 collection goal of ETB 816.70 billion, a 56 percent increase over this year's total, and equal to 76 percent of the country's entire domestic tax revenue target. Meeting that number will likely depend on the same narrow cluster of state enterprises, plus whichever private firms can scale fast enough to matter.
Why This Matters
Ethiopia is in the middle of financial sector liberalization, with foreign banks expected to enter the market in the coming years. That will test whether Awash Bank can hold its position as the private sector's fiscal standout, and whether any other domestically owned firm can join it near the top. For now, the story of Ethiopia's tax base is a story of concentration: a handful of state monopolies, a couple of foreign brewers, and one private bank carrying weight that hundreds of other companies combined cannot match.