David Kirton
SHENZHEN, China (Reuters) – China’s Huawei Technologies said on Friday it has made breakthroughs in areas from operating systems to artificial intelligence, and that it took the company 10 years to do what took the United States and Europe 30 years.
Richard Yu, chairman of Huawei’s consumer business group, spoke at the opening of a three-day developer conference in the southern Chinese city of Dongguan, where he said the company’s Harmony operating system is now available on more than 900 million devices.
“Harmony has made a major breakthrough. We can say that in 10 years we have achieved what our European and American colleagues took more than 30 years to achieve, in terms of creating the basic technology of an independent operating system,” Yu said.
HarmonyOS is Huawei’s own operating system, which it released in 2019 when technological restrictions in the US prevented it from supporting Google’s (NASDAQ:) Android operating system, which the company used to power smartphones.
Ascend’s AI infrastructure, the most powerful of the Chinese companies, has now become the second most popular after Nvidia (NASDAQ:), which dominates the AI chip market, Yu added.
Operating systems and other software have long dominated in Europe and the United States, although the Internet of Things era has given Huawei an opportunity to overtake them, he said.
Huawei’s smartphone business has seen a revival since it launched the Mate 60 last year with an improved Chinese-made chip. Sales of Harmony-equipped smartphones grew 68% in the first five months of the year, Yu said.
In the first quarter of 2024, Huawei’s HarmonyOS surpassed Apple’s (NASDAQ:) iOS to become the second best-selling mobile operating system in China after Android with a 17% market share, according to research firm Counterpoint.