Huawei says it has made huge strides, from operating systems to AI

By David Kirton

SHENZHEN, China (Reuters) -China's Huawei Technologies said on Friday it had made breakthroughs in fields from operating systems to artificial intelligence, and that it had taken the company 10 years to do what the United States and Europe took 30 years to achieve.

Richard Yu, chairman of Huawei's Consumer Business Group, was speaking 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 was now available on more than 900 million devices.

"Harmony has made major breakthroughs. You can say in 10 years we've achieved what it took our European and American counterparts more than 30 years to do, in terms of building the core technology of an independent operating system," Yu said.

HarmonyOS is Huawei's proprietary operating system which it launched in 2019, when U.S. technology restrictions cut it off from Google support for the Android operating system it used in smartphones.

The company's Ascend artificial intelligence infrastructure - the most powerful from a Chinese company - was now the second most popular after Nvidia, which dominates the market for AI chips, Yu added.

Operating systems and other software has been dominated by Europe and the United States for a long time, although the era of internet of things has given Huawei an opportunity to overtake them, he said.

Huawei's smartphone business has gone through a renaissance since the Mate 60 launched last year with a improved China-made chip. Harmony-equipped smartphone sales have risen 68% in the first five months of the year, Yu said.

In the first quarter of 2024, Huawei's HarmonyOS surpassed Apple's iOS to become the second best-selling mobile operating system in China behind Android with a 17% market share, research firm Counterpoint said.

(Reporting by David Kirton; Editing by Anne Marie Roantree and Christopher Cushing and Miral Fahmy)