How a Chinese billionaire built her fortune

Lens Technology is now a leading supplier of the so-called cover glass used in laptops, tablets and mobiles

Zhou Qunfei is the world’s richest self-made woman. Zhou, the founder of Lens Technology, owns a $27 million estate in Hong Kong. She jets off to Silicon Valley and Seoul to court executives at Apple and Samsung, her two biggest customers. She has played host to President Xi Jinping of China when he visited her company’s headquarters.

Zhou knows the drill. For years, she laboured in a factory, the best job she could get having grown up in an impoverished village in central China. Zhou has honed her hands-on knowledge into a world-class, multibillion-dollar operation, one at the vanguard of China’s push into high-end manufacturing.

Lens Technology is now one of the leading suppliers of the so-called cover glass used in laptops, tablets and mobile devices, including the Apple iPhone and the Samsung Galaxy. This year, her factories are expected to churn out more than a billion glass screens, each refined to a fraction of a millimetre.

“This is an industry that requires highly sophisticated technology,” says Stone Wu, an analyst at IHS Technology, the research firm. “If you have a ruler, check out how thin 0.5 millimetre is, and you’ll understand how hard it is to manufacture something that thin.”

In creating a global supplier, Zhou, 44, has come to define a new class of female entrepreneurs in China who have built their wealth from scratch – a rarity in the world of business. In Japan, there is not a single self-made female billionaire, according to Forbes. In the US and Europe, most women who are billionaires secured their wealth through inheritance.

No country has more self-made female billionaires than China. The Communist party, under Mao Zedong, promoted gender equality, allowing women to flourish after capitalism started to take hold, according to Huang Yasheng, an expert in China’s entrepreneurial class and a professor of international management at MIT. And in a country with few established players, entrepreneurs like Zhou were able to quickly make their mark when they entered business in the 1990s as China’s economic engine was revving up.

Zhou’s stake in Lens Technology, which went public this year, is worth $7.2 billion. That puts her fortune on par with the media tycoon John Malone and Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay. Zhou isn’t a celebrity chieftain, like Jack Ma, the billionaire founder of Alibaba, the e-commerce giant. Few in China had even heard her name before her company’s public offering this year. She rarely grants interviews or makes public appearances.

“In the village where I grew up, a lot of girls didn’t have a choice of whether to go to middle school. They would get engaged or married and spend their entire life in that village,” she said in an interview at her office where there was a wo-oden statue of Mao and a 27-inch desktop Mac. “I chose to be in business, and I don’t regret it.”

The youngest of three children, Zhou was born in a tiny village in central China’s Hunan province, a farming community about two hours south of Changsha, the provincial capital. Her mother died when she was 5. Her father, a skilled craftsman, later lost a finger and most of his eyesight in an industrial accident. At home, she helped her family raise pigs and ducks for food and additional money. At school, she excelled. “She was a hardworking and talented student,” Zhong Xiaobai, her former middle-school teacher, says.

Despite her academic focus, Zhou dropped out of school at 16 and travelled south to Guangdong province, to live with her uncle’s family and search for better work. While she dreamed of becoming a fashion designer, she eventually landed a job on a factory floor in the city of She-nzhen, making watch lenses for about $1 a day.

The conditions, she said, were harsh. “I worked from 8 am to 12 am, and sometimes until 2 am,” Zhou recalled. After three months, she decided to quit and wrote a letter of resignation to her boss. In it, she complained about the hours and boredom. Even so, she expressed her gratitude for the job, saying she wanted to learn more. The letter impressed the factory chief, who told her the plant was about to adopt new processes. He asked her to stay, offering her a promotion. It was the first of several over the next three years.

In 1993, Zhou, then 22, decided to set out on her own. With $3,000 in savings, she and several relatives started their own workshop next door. They lured customers with the promise of even higher-quality watch lenses. At the new company, Zhou did it all. She repaired and designed factory machinery. She taught herself complex screen-printing processes and difficult techniques that allowed her to improve prints for curved glass.

Along the way, Zhou Qunfei married her former factory boss, had a child and divorced. She later married a long-time factory colleague, who serves on the Lens board, and had a second child. Her work habits lean toward the obsessive. Her company’s headquarters is at one of her manufacturing plants in Changsha. In her spacious office, a door behind her desk opens into a small apartment, ensuring she can roam the factory floor day or night.

Propelled to dominance
It was the mobile phone that made Zhou a billionaire. In 2003, she was still making glass for watches when she received an unexpected phone call from executives at Motorola. They asked if she was willing to help them develop a glass screen for their new device, the Razr V3. At the time, the display screens on most mobile phones were made of plastic. Motorola wanted a glass display that would be more resistant to scratches and provide sharper images for text messages, photos and multimedia.

“I got this call, and they said, ‘Just answer yes or no, and if the answer’s yes, we’ll help you set up the process,’” Zhou recalled. “I said yes.” Soon after, orders started rolling in from other mobile phone makers like HTC, Nokia and Samsung. Then, in 2007, Apple entered the market with the iPhone, which had a keyboard-enabled glass touch screen that rewrote the rules of the game for mobile devices. Apple picked Lens as its supplier, propelling Zhou’s company into a dominant position in China.

Lens operates round-the-clock, with 75,000 workers spread across three main manufacturing facilities that occupy about 800 acres in the Changsha region. Each day, the company receives bulk shipments of glass from global manufacturers like Corning in the United States and Asahi Glass in Japan.

The glass is cut, ground down to size, bored with holes and polished to give each plate a transparent finish. Then the plates are strengthened in a potassium ion bath, painted and cured. Finally, they are cleaned and coated with anti-smudge and anti-reflection films.

Zhou designs and choreographs nearly every step of the process, a detailed-oriented approach she traces to her childhood. “My father had lost his eyesight, so if we placed something somewhere, it had to be in the right spot, exactly, or something could go wrong,” she said. “That’s the attention to detail I demand at the workplace.”

“As a quality inspector, I had to stare at those products all day long, so this is a tiring job,” said Gao Zhimei, who recently left Lens Technology. “But I should say that working in manufacturing is always tiring and working at Lens is not more tiring than working in other factories.”