Zhou Qunfei: Screen Queen

Growing up in China in the 1970, did Zhou Qunfei dream of owning a company and becoming a billionaire? Of course not. How could she when the very notion of ‘enterprise’ did not exist under Mao? Besides, the youngster had a more immediate concern. “I had to constantly think about where my next meal is and how I am going to get it,” she told CNBC in a 2018 interview.

Before becoming a wealthy entrepreneur at the end of the 1990s, Zhou knew hardship and misfortune. Her father was blinded in a factory accident before she was born and her mother died when she was five. Zhou may be sitting on a fortune of $8.3 billion in 2024, but as a girl, the Hunan province native and her two siblings lived in a state of extreme precariousness, with her widower father eking out a meager living making chairs and baskets out of bamboo. Despite being a promising student, due to her family’s dire financial situation, Zhou was forced to quit school at 16 and enter the workforce.

Go south, young woman
She upped sticks and moved 900 miles due south to the metropolis of Shenzhen, Ground Zero for China’s modern economy after being designated the country’s first special economic zone in the 1980s, due to its close proximity to the then British colony of Hong Kong. It was here that the first Chinese pan-national companies arose.

These days a thriving tech hub that’s home to scores of Fortune 500 companies, when Zhou moved to Shenzhen the city was little more than a vast production line for Western products, and she ended up working in a factory producing glass for wristwatches. Having gotten a foothold in the city, the country girl turned her attention to bettering herself, taking IT and accounting courses in her limited free-time.

"Apple turned to Zhou’s company to supply the screens for its very first iPhone"  

Frugal to the point of obsession, by 1993 she had managed to put enough money away to start her own business and at the tender age of 23 opened up her own glass workshop, which operated out of her apartment and was staffed by family members.

Opportunity knocks
At the dawn of the 21st century, mobile phone manufacturers made a decision that would directly impact the fortunes of Zhou’s fledgling business: from now on the screens of handsets were to be made from glass rather than plastic.  

In boardrooms across the western world, the rush was on to find glass suppliers in China. Zhou seized the opportunity with both hands. In 2001, she won a tender to make phone screens for Chinese group TCL and two years later, the now named Lens Technology won a massive contract from Motorola. Then, the floodgates opened. Apple turned to Zhou’s company to supply the screens for its very first iPhone. The smartphone era begun, Samsung and Huawai followed suit. These days, 40% of the mobile phones in the world contain a screen made by Lens Technology.   

The Changsha-headquartered firm, which went public in 2015, now has over 100,000 employees. Never one to stay in her lane, under Zhou’s leadership, Lens Technology has branched out into the automobile sector and now works with electric vehicle manufacturers BYD and Tesla. The group also boasts its own research institute that’s home to 10,000 staff and has registered 2,000 patents and counting.

For the Chinese public, Zhou Qenfei is a potent symbol of the Chinese Dream: a woman who came from nothing, who through her own hard work and ingenuity amassed a fortune and whose success is known across the globe.  

Despite all she has accomplished over the past three decades, the world’s richest self-made woman eschews the spotlight and making political pronouncements (a wise move when one is part of the 'Red Billionaires' club). She maintains a low-key existence in Hong Kong – you are more likely to spot her playing ping pong in the local recreation center than living it up on a yacht on Victoria Harbour. Success, clearly, has not gone to Zhou's head.