Reply to Comment on ‘Product states and Schmidt rank of mutually unbiased bases in dimension six’

McNulty and Weigert (2024 J. Phys. A: Math. Theor. submitted) voiced suspicions to the lemma 11(v) Part 6 in Chen and Yu (2017 J. Phys. A: Math. Theor. 50 475304) and three theorems derived in later publications (Liang et al 2019 Quantum Inf. Process. 18 352; Liang et al 2019 Linear Multilinear Algebra 69 2908-25; Chen et al 2021 Quantum Inf. Process. 20 353). For these suspicions, we reprove that any 6 × 6 complex Hadamard matrix whose number of real elements more than 22 does not belong to a set of four mutually unbiased bases. We show that the number of 2 × 2 complex Hadamard submatrices of any H₂-reducible matrix is not 10 , … , 16 , 18 . We also put forward some possible directions for further development.