That just shows they had the foresight to start a long time ago. It could be the case that they never intended to actually use their own OS but thought they might need one as leverage in the future, and that's the situation they're in now.

They did state that a year ago.

Good luck to them. Microsoft, Samsung, Blackberry tried it and failed. Blackberry even had their own OS before Android took over.

Blackberry was quite successful with their own OS for a long time. It's mostly because people picked bigger screens over the full QWERTY keyboard (which I still kind of miss) of Blackberry.

It is hard to fight against free beer.

From the article - it sounds similar to sailfish or bb10:

The Huawei OS is based on a microkernel that is light and can react quickly to adjustments and batches, according to the people with knowledge. Huawei engineers on the OS project have also studied Android and Apple’s iOS closely to learn from them.

One of the biggest technical challenges for the Huawei OS under development has been its compatibility with Android, one of the sources said. Compatibility would enable a Huawei phone with its own OS to download and run Android apps seamlessly. Having a successful compatibility layer with Android would also mean that app developers around the world would not need to develop extra code for Huawei’s OS.

it tells a lot that most major manufactures have a post-android backup plan, including Google