SHENZHEN, China, June 21 (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 ( NVDA ), 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.