China’s Huawei Technologies announced on Friday that it has achieved strides in areas ranging from artificial intelligence to operating systems, and that it had accomplished what the US and Europe had taken thirty years to do in ten years.

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 accessible 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.

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. technological limitations.

According to Yu, the company’s Ascend artificial intelligence infrastructure, which is the most potent among Chinese companies, is now the second most well-liked product, behind only Nvidia in 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 overcome them in the internet of things age, he added.

Huawei’s smartphone industry has seen a rebirth since the Mate 60, which debuted last year and included an upgraded processor 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 company Counterpoint, Huawei’s HarmonyOS overtook Apple’s iOS in the first quarter of 2024 to take the second spot after Android as the most popular mobile operating system in China, with a 17% market share.

(Adapted from EconomicTimes.com)