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Sohu.com Inc and Web rivals that sell short messages, music and news to China's cell-phone users said they are losing revenue because customers are exploiting a flaw in China Mobile Communications Corp's payment system.

A delay between purchase and billing enables China Mobile's prepaid users to carry on buying Web services after credit on their phone cards should have run out, some users said.

``There is a gap between the amount of services that we record and what China Mobile records,'' said Caroline Straathof, Sohu's investor relations director in Beijing, who declined to estimate the revenue shortfall. ``They record fewer services than we know we have provided.''

The discrepancy is chipping away at profits for Sohu, Sina Corp and others, which have been rising as more Chinese use their mobile phones to exchange news, photographs and music.

Sohu, one of China's three biggest Internet companies, earned US$7.1 million in net income in the second quarter, its fifth profitable quarter.

Sohu and rivals Sina.com Inc and Netease.com Inc have reported increasing revenue from sales of short messages and news, such as instant updates of match scores during last year's soccer World Cup. Sales were further bolstered this year when the SARS epidemic caused consumers to avoid shops and spend more time using the Internet and mobile phones.

China Mobile, which runs the country's biggest cellular phone network, has collected fees on behalf of Sohu and other Internet companies through its Monternet system since 2000.

When subscribers with cell-phone service contracts buy short-message services, the fees are added to their monthly cell-phone bills. Fees for prepaid users, though, are charged by deducting call-time credit from the card account.

Three-fifths of China Mobile's 131 million subscribers, and as many as half of smaller rival China Unicom Ltd's 60 million users are on prepaid cards. China Mobile's prepaid users on average spent 59 yuan (US$7) a month during the first half, a third of spending by contract subscribers.

Customers such as Zou Ming say they can receive up to 1,000 messages from companies such as Sohu and Tom.com Ltd free because of the billing lag. Zou, a 25-year-old part-time student, said he uses prepaid phone cards to buy music and download movie clips such as AOL-Time Warner Inc's Terminator 3, and games. ``Anything you can buy online using a cell phone, I can get for free,'' he said in Beijing.

Some companies in China, including Ebay Inc's local subsidiary EachNet, don't allow customers to pay for services via cell phones because of security concerns.

The payment problem underscores how far China has to go to catch up with Japan and South Korea, where a broad range of services from retailing to dating to financial advice are available over the cellular phone network, analysts said.

``China's cell-phone payment market is still in its infancy,'' said Li Kang, an analyst at China Labs Consulting Ltd. ``Right now you can only make small purchases with cell phones due to problems with security.''

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