China’s Huawei Technologies said on Friday that it had made strides in areas ranging from artificial intelligence to operating systems, and that it had only taken the business ten years to do what it had taken the United States and Europe thirty years to complete.
Speaking at the start of a three-day developer conference in the southern Chinese city of Dongguan, Richard Yu, the chairman of Huawei’s Consumer Business Group, announced that the company’s Harmony operating system was now available on more than 900 million devices.
“Harmony has achieved significant progress. You might say that in terms of developing the fundamental technology of a stand-alone operating system, we’ve accomplished in ten years what it took our American and European competitors more than thirty years to do,” Yu stated.
Huawei introduced HarmonyOS, a proprietary operating system, in 2019 after being cut off from Google support for the Android operating system it uses in smartphones due to U.S. technology limitations.
Yu said that the company’s Ascend artificial intelligence infrastructure, which is the strongest produced by a Chinese company, is currently the second most well-liked product, behind Nvidia, which controls the majority of the AI chip market.
Europe and the US have long held a monopoly on operating systems and other software, but Huawei has a potential to overtake them in the internet of things age, he said.
Huawei’s smartphone industry has seen a rebirth since the Mate 60, which debuted last year and included an upgraded chip built in China, was introduced. Sales of smartphones with Harmony have increased 68% in the first five months of the year, according to Yu.
According to research firm Counterpoint, Huawei’s HarmonyOS overtook Apple’s iOS in the first quarter of 2024 to take the second spot behind Android as the most popular mobile operating system in China, with a 17% market share.