ZTE Corp, China's second-biggest maker of phone equipment, will release a new mobile operating system with the developer of the Firefox web browser to compete with Google Inc's Android software.

The software will be available in the December quarter, ZTE Executive Vice President He Shiyou said in Beijing yesterday. Closely held Mozilla Corp makes Firefox.

ZTE is in talks with overseas carriers to offer devices with the new operating system to reduce its reliance on Android as it expects smartphone sales to double this year amid market share gains in Europe, North America, Brazil and Japan. ZTE is expanding in mobile devices and cloud computing where sales growth is faster than its traditional equipment business as the pace of new network rollouts slows.

"We will not rely on only one operating system," He said. The Shenzhen-based company uses Android on about 90 percent of its smartphones with the rest using Microsoft Corp's Windows mobile platform.

The challenges confronting ZTE to build an operating system that can compete with Android, Windows Phone or Apple Inc's iOS will be huge, not the least of which is creating a community of developers to make games and other apps for the devices.

As app developers are already committed to the existing systems, ZTE's plan is "a very unrealistic strategy," Pierre Ferragu, a London-based analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co, said yesterday.

"Operating systems follow winner-take-all rules," Ferragu said. "How can an operating system limited to a small, low-end manufacturer gain traction ever?"