March 17 (Reuters) – Huawei Technologies Co Ltd has replaced a lot more than 13,000 components in its merchandise that have been hit by U.S. trade sanctions, the Chinese tech giant’s founder mentioned, according to a speech transcript posted on Friday by a Chinese university.

According to the transcript of the February speech posted by Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Ren Zhengfei mentioned Huawei had more than the previous 3 years replaced the 13,000 elements with domestic Chinese substitutes and had redesigned four,000 circuit boards for its merchandise.

He mentioned production of circuit boards had “stabilized.”

The remarks, which Reuters could not independently confirm, supplied a window into Huawei’s efforts to bounce back from U.S. trade restrictions. Given that 2019, Huawei, a significant supplier of gear utilised in 5G telecommunications networks, has been the target of successive rounds of U.S. export controls.

These controls reduce off each Huawei’s provide of chips from U.S. businesses and its access to U.S. technologies tools to design and style its personal chips and have them manufactured by partners. The Biden administration final year also banned the sale of new Huawei gear in the U.S.

Ren created the remarks in a speak to Chinese technologies authorities on Feb. 24, the university mentioned. The university posted the transcript on its internet site on Friday. A U.S.-primarily based Huawei representative did not promptly respond to a request for comment on Friday.

Ren mentioned Huawei invested $23.eight billion in investigation and improvement in 2022, and “as our profitability improves, we’ll continue to raise R&ampD spending.”

The founder mentioned the firm had constructed its personal enterprise resource preparing method, known as MetaERP. To launch in April, it will enable run its core business enterprise functions, which includes finance, provide chain and manufacturing operations.

Ren mentioned Huawei has no plans to launch a rival to the wildly well-liked huge language model AI ChatGPT, but mentioned Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O), the backer of the application’s developer OpenAI, would not be the only dominant player. He mentioned Huawei is focusing on getting the “underlying computing energy platform” of AI.

Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco and Krystal Hu in New York Editing by Cynthia Osterman and William Mallard

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