Zhou Qunfei - From A factory worker To The world's Richest Self-Made Woman.
It's lengthy but very inspiring.
Be inspired!
The story of Zhou Qunfei
Zhou Qunfei is the founder of Lens
Technology and owns a $27 million estate in
Hong Kong. Her stake in Lens Technology,
which went public this year, is worth $7.2
billion. But long before all this, she worked in
a factory and helped her family raise pigs and
ducks for food and additional money.
This is her inspiring story written by David
Barboza for The New York Times. Read it
after the cut...
How a Chinese Billionaire
Built Her Fortune
Qunfei is the world’s richest self-made
woman. Ms. Zhou, the founder of Lens
Technology, owns a $27 million estate in
Hong Kong. She jets off to Silicon Valley and
Seoul, South Korea, 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.
But she seems most at home pacing the floor
of her state-of-the-art factory, tinkering.
She’ll dip her hands into a tray of water, to
determine whether the temperature is just
right. She can explain the intricacies of
heating glass in a potassium ion bath. When
she passes a grinding machine, she is apt to
ask technicians to step aside so she can take
their place for a while.
Ms. Zhou knows the drill. For years, she
labored in a factory, the best job she could
get having grown up in an impoverished
village in central China.
"She 'll sometimes sit down and worked as
an operator to see if there is anything wrong
with the process," said James Zhao, a general
manager at Lens Technology. “That will put
me in a very awkward position. If there was a
problem, she'd say, "Why didn't you see that?"
Ms. 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 millimeter.
“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
millimeters is, and you’ll understand how hard
it is to manufacture something that thin.”
Linda Ikeji at 10:58 AM
From a factory worker to the world's richest
self-made woman: The story of Zhou Qunfei
Zhou Qunfei is the founder of Lens
Technology and owns a $27 million estate in
Hong Kong. Her stake in Lens Technology,
which went public this year, is worth $7.2
billion. But long before all this, she worked in
a factory and helped her family raise pigs and
ducks for food and additional money.
This is her inspiring story written by David
Barboza for The New York Times. Read it
after the cut...
How a Chinese Billionaire
Built Her Fortune
Qunfei is the world’s richest self-made
woman. Ms. Zhou, the founder of Lens
Technology, owns a $27 million estate in
Hong Kong. She jets off to Silicon Valley and
Seoul, South Korea, 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.
But she seems most at home pacing the floor
of her state-of-the-art factory, tinkering.
She’ll dip her hands into a tray of water, to
determine whether the temperature is just
right. She can explain the intricacies of
heating glass in a potassium ion bath. When
she passes a grinding machine, she is apt to
ask technicians to step aside so she can take
their place for a while.
Ms. Zhou knows the drill. For years, she
labored in a factory, the best job she could
get having grown up in an impoverished
village in central China.
"She 'll sometimes sit down and worked as
an operator to see if there is anything wrong
with the process," said James Zhao, a general
manager at Lens Technology. “That will put
me in a very awkward position. If there was a
problem, she'd say, "Why didn't you see that?"
Ms. 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 millimeter.
“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
millimeters is, and you’ll understand how hard
it is to manufacture something that thin.”
In creating a global supplier, Ms. Zhou, 44,
has come to define a new class of female
entrepreneurs in China who have built their
wealth from nearly nothing — a rarity in the
world of business. In Japan, there is not a
single self-made female billionaire, according
to Forbes. In the United States 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 M.I.T. And in a country with
few established players, entrepreneurs like Ms.
Zhou were able to quickly make their mark
when they entered business in the 1990s as
China’s economic engine was revving up.
Ms. 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 C. Malone and Pierre Omidyar,
the founder of eBay.
Ms. Zhou isn’t a celebrity chieftain, like Jack
Ma, the billionaire founder of the e-commerce
giant Alibaba. Few in China had even heard
her name before her company’s public offering
this year. She rarely grants interviews or
makes public appearances.
An elegant woman with a cherubic face,
owlish glasses and a preference for Christian
Dior suits, Ms. Zhou is fastidious and
demanding — “Sit up straight!” she commands
of a general manager during a meeting. Yet
she exudes charm and humility, a quiet
recognition that things could have easily
turned out differently.
“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 wooden statue of Mao and
a 27-inch desktop Mac. “I chose to be in
business, and I don’t regret it.”
Leaning Toward the Obsessive
The youngest of three children, Ms. Zhou was
born in a tiny village in the Hunan Province of
central China, 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 hard-working and talented
student,” Zhong Xiaobai, her former middle-
school teacher, says. “I once read her essay,
‘My Mother,’ aloud in class. It was so moving
it brought everyone to tears.”
Despite her academic focus, Ms. Zhou
dropped out of school at 16 and traveled
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 Shenzhen, making
watch lenses for about $1 a day.
The conditions, she said, were harsh. “I worked
from 8 a.m. to 12 a.m., and sometimes until 2
a.m.,” Ms. Zhou recalled. “There were no
shifts, just a few dozen people, and we all
polished glass. I didn’t enjoy it.”
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, Ms. 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, Ms. 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.
“In the Hunan language, we call women like
her ‘ba de man,’ which means a person who
dares to do what others are afraid to do,” said
her cousin Zhou Xinyi, who helped her open
the workshop and now serves on the Lens
board.
Along the way, Zhou Qunfei married her
former factory boss, had a child and divorced.
She later married a longtime 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 Ms. 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,’ ” Ms. 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 Ms.
Zhou’s company into a dominant position in
China.
After that, Ms. Zhou invested heavily in new
facilities and hired skilled technicians. More
than once, colleagues say, she put up her
apartment as a guarantee for a new bank
loan. Within five years, she had manufacturing
plants under construction in three cities.
“She’s a passionate entrepreneur, and she’s
very hands-on,” says James Hollis, an
executive at Corning, which has a partnership
with Lens Technology. “I’ve watched her
company grow, and her develop a strong
team. Now there are over 100 competitors in
this space, but Lens is a Tier 1 player.”
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
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.
Ms. 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.”
Lens has not experienced the kinds of labor
troubles that have clouded other contract
manufacturers like Foxconn. But current and
former workers say the job is challenging.
Much of the work is done by young women
who inspect glass at different angles, trying to
detect flaws.
“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.”
Expanding a Customer Base
Lens Technology went public in March, as the
Chinese stock market was booming. With the
recent market collapse, the company has lost
45 percent in value, but it is still worth about
$8 billion.
Last year, the company notched revenue of
about $2.4 billion. Profit rose 40 percent in
the first quarter. But Lens gets nearly 75
percent of its revenue from Apple and
Samsung, making the company reliant on just
two customers. In May, at the first
shareholders’ meeting since the company went
public, an investor pressed Lens about how it
planned to maintain an edge in a
hypercompetitive market that thrives on
innovation.
Several executives tried to answer the
question. Then Ms. Zhou spoke up, saying she
was prepared to diversify the company’s
business with production facilities geared
toward higher-end glass, as well as sapphire
and ceramic.
After the meeting adjourned, investors piled
into a bus and rode with Ms. Zhou to the Lens
campus, less than a mile away. Ms. Zhou had
sat quietly through much of the shareholders’
meeting, but on the tour of the factory, she
came alive. The shareholders hung on every
word.
Lens technology in luiyang, Hunan China.
In creating a global supplier, Ms. Zhou, 44,
has come to define a new class of female
entrepreneurs in China who have built their
wealth from nearly nothing — a rarity in the
world of business. In Japan, there is not a
single self-made female billionaire, according
to Forbes. In the United States 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 M.I.T. And in a country with
few established players, entrepreneurs like Ms.
Zhou were able to quickly make their mark
when they entered business in the 1990s as
China’s economic engine was revving up.
Ms. 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 C. Malone and Pierre Omidyar,
the founder of eBay.
Ms. Zhou isn’t a celebrity chieftain, like Jack
Ma, the billionaire founder of the e-commerce
giant Alibaba. Few in China had even heard
her name before her company’s public offering
this year. She rarely grants interviews or
makes public appearances.
An elegant woman with a cherubic face,
owlish glasses and a preference for Christian
Dior suits, Ms. Zhou is fastidious and
demanding — “Sit up straight!” she commands
of a general manager during a meeting. Yet
she exudes charm and humility, a quiet
recognition that things could have easily
turned out differently.
“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 wooden statue of Mao and
a 27-inch desktop Mac. “I chose to be in
business, and I don’t regret it.”
Leaning Toward the Obsessive
The youngest of three children, Ms. Zhou was
born in a tiny village in the Hunan Province of
central China, 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 hard-working and talented
student,” Zhong Xiaobai, her former middle-
school teacher, says. “I once read her essay,
‘My Mother,’ aloud in class. It was so moving
it brought everyone to tears.”
Despite her academic focus, Ms. Zhou
dropped out of school at 16 and traveled
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 Shenzhen, making
watch lenses for about $1 a day.
The conditions, she said, were harsh. “I worked
from 8 a.m. to 12 a.m., and sometimes until 2
a.m.,” Ms. Zhou recalled. “There were no
shifts, just a few dozen people, and we all
polished glass. I didn’t enjoy it.”
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, Ms. 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, Ms. 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.
“In the Hunan language, we call women like
her ‘ba de man,’ which means a person who
dares to do what others are afraid to do,” said
her cousin Zhou Xinyi, who helped her open
the workshop and now serves on the Lens
board.
Along the way, Zhou Qunfei married her
former factory boss, had a child and divorced.
She later married a longtime 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 Ms. 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,’ ” Ms. 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 Ms.
Zhou’s company into a dominant position in
China.
After that, Ms. Zhou invested heavily in new
facilities and hired skilled technicians. More
than once, colleagues say, she put up her
apartment as a guarantee for a new bank
loan. Within five years, she had manufacturing
plants under construction in three cities.
“She’s a passionate entrepreneur, and she’s
very hands-on,” says James Hollis, an
executive at Corning, which has a partnership
with Lens Technology. “I’ve watched her
company grow, and her develop a strong
team. Now there are over 100 competitors in
this space, but Lens is a Tier 1 player.”
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
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.
Ms. 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.”
Lens has not experienced the kinds of labor
troubles that have clouded other contract
manufacturers like Foxconn. But current and
former workers say the job is challenging.
Much of the work is done by young women
who inspect glass at different angles, trying to
detect flaws.
“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.”
Expanding a Customer Base
Lens Technology went public in March, as the
Chinese stock market was booming. With the
recent market collapse, the company has lost
45 percent in value, but it is still worth about
$8 billion.
Last year, the company notched revenue of
about $2.4 billion. Profit rose 40 percent in
the first quarter. But Lens gets nearly 75
percent of its revenue from Apple and
Samsung, making the company reliant on just
two customers. In May, at the first
shareholders’ meeting since the company went
public, an investor pressed Lens about how it
planned to maintain an edge in a
hypercompetitive market that thrives on
innovation.
Several executives tried to answer the
question. Then Ms. Zhou spoke up, saying she
was prepared to diversify the company’s
business with production facilities geared
toward higher-end glass, as well as sapphire
and ceramic.
After the meeting adjourned, investors piled
into a bus and rode with Ms. Zhou to the Lens
campus, less than a mile away. Ms. Zhou had
sat quietly through much of the shareholders’
meeting, but on the tour of the factory, she
came alive. The shareholders hung on every
word.
Source :Linda Ikeji's Blog
Be inspired!
The story of Zhou Qunfei
Zhou Qunfei is the founder of Lens
Technology and owns a $27 million estate in
Hong Kong. Her stake in Lens Technology,
which went public this year, is worth $7.2
billion. But long before all this, she worked in
a factory and helped her family raise pigs and
ducks for food and additional money.
This is her inspiring story written by David
Barboza for The New York Times. Read it
after the cut...
How a Chinese Billionaire
Built Her Fortune
Qunfei is the world’s richest self-made
woman. Ms. Zhou, the founder of Lens
Technology, owns a $27 million estate in
Hong Kong. She jets off to Silicon Valley and
Seoul, South Korea, 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.
But she seems most at home pacing the floor
of her state-of-the-art factory, tinkering.
She’ll dip her hands into a tray of water, to
determine whether the temperature is just
right. She can explain the intricacies of
heating glass in a potassium ion bath. When
she passes a grinding machine, she is apt to
ask technicians to step aside so she can take
their place for a while.
Ms. Zhou knows the drill. For years, she
labored in a factory, the best job she could
get having grown up in an impoverished
village in central China.
"She 'll sometimes sit down and worked as
an operator to see if there is anything wrong
with the process," said James Zhao, a general
manager at Lens Technology. “That will put
me in a very awkward position. If there was a
problem, she'd say, "Why didn't you see that?"
Ms. 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 millimeter.
“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
millimeters is, and you’ll understand how hard
it is to manufacture something that thin.”
Linda Ikeji at 10:58 AM
From a factory worker to the world's richest
self-made woman: The story of Zhou Qunfei
Zhou Qunfei is the founder of Lens
Technology and owns a $27 million estate in
Hong Kong. Her stake in Lens Technology,
which went public this year, is worth $7.2
billion. But long before all this, she worked in
a factory and helped her family raise pigs and
ducks for food and additional money.
This is her inspiring story written by David
Barboza for The New York Times. Read it
after the cut...
How a Chinese Billionaire
Built Her Fortune
Qunfei is the world’s richest self-made
woman. Ms. Zhou, the founder of Lens
Technology, owns a $27 million estate in
Hong Kong. She jets off to Silicon Valley and
Seoul, South Korea, 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.
But she seems most at home pacing the floor
of her state-of-the-art factory, tinkering.
She’ll dip her hands into a tray of water, to
determine whether the temperature is just
right. She can explain the intricacies of
heating glass in a potassium ion bath. When
she passes a grinding machine, she is apt to
ask technicians to step aside so she can take
their place for a while.
Ms. Zhou knows the drill. For years, she
labored in a factory, the best job she could
get having grown up in an impoverished
village in central China.
"She 'll sometimes sit down and worked as
an operator to see if there is anything wrong
with the process," said James Zhao, a general
manager at Lens Technology. “That will put
me in a very awkward position. If there was a
problem, she'd say, "Why didn't you see that?"
Ms. 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 millimeter.
“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
millimeters is, and you’ll understand how hard
it is to manufacture something that thin.”
In creating a global supplier, Ms. Zhou, 44,
has come to define a new class of female
entrepreneurs in China who have built their
wealth from nearly nothing — a rarity in the
world of business. In Japan, there is not a
single self-made female billionaire, according
to Forbes. In the United States 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 M.I.T. And in a country with
few established players, entrepreneurs like Ms.
Zhou were able to quickly make their mark
when they entered business in the 1990s as
China’s economic engine was revving up.
Ms. 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 C. Malone and Pierre Omidyar,
the founder of eBay.
Ms. Zhou isn’t a celebrity chieftain, like Jack
Ma, the billionaire founder of the e-commerce
giant Alibaba. Few in China had even heard
her name before her company’s public offering
this year. She rarely grants interviews or
makes public appearances.
An elegant woman with a cherubic face,
owlish glasses and a preference for Christian
Dior suits, Ms. Zhou is fastidious and
demanding — “Sit up straight!” she commands
of a general manager during a meeting. Yet
she exudes charm and humility, a quiet
recognition that things could have easily
turned out differently.
“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 wooden statue of Mao and
a 27-inch desktop Mac. “I chose to be in
business, and I don’t regret it.”
Leaning Toward the Obsessive
The youngest of three children, Ms. Zhou was
born in a tiny village in the Hunan Province of
central China, 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 hard-working and talented
student,” Zhong Xiaobai, her former middle-
school teacher, says. “I once read her essay,
‘My Mother,’ aloud in class. It was so moving
it brought everyone to tears.”
Despite her academic focus, Ms. Zhou
dropped out of school at 16 and traveled
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 Shenzhen, making
watch lenses for about $1 a day.
The conditions, she said, were harsh. “I worked
from 8 a.m. to 12 a.m., and sometimes until 2
a.m.,” Ms. Zhou recalled. “There were no
shifts, just a few dozen people, and we all
polished glass. I didn’t enjoy it.”
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, Ms. 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, Ms. 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.
“In the Hunan language, we call women like
her ‘ba de man,’ which means a person who
dares to do what others are afraid to do,” said
her cousin Zhou Xinyi, who helped her open
the workshop and now serves on the Lens
board.
Along the way, Zhou Qunfei married her
former factory boss, had a child and divorced.
She later married a longtime 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 Ms. 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,’ ” Ms. 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 Ms.
Zhou’s company into a dominant position in
China.
After that, Ms. Zhou invested heavily in new
facilities and hired skilled technicians. More
than once, colleagues say, she put up her
apartment as a guarantee for a new bank
loan. Within five years, she had manufacturing
plants under construction in three cities.
“She’s a passionate entrepreneur, and she’s
very hands-on,” says James Hollis, an
executive at Corning, which has a partnership
with Lens Technology. “I’ve watched her
company grow, and her develop a strong
team. Now there are over 100 competitors in
this space, but Lens is a Tier 1 player.”
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
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.
Ms. 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.”
Lens has not experienced the kinds of labor
troubles that have clouded other contract
manufacturers like Foxconn. But current and
former workers say the job is challenging.
Much of the work is done by young women
who inspect glass at different angles, trying to
detect flaws.
“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.”
Expanding a Customer Base
Lens Technology went public in March, as the
Chinese stock market was booming. With the
recent market collapse, the company has lost
45 percent in value, but it is still worth about
$8 billion.
Last year, the company notched revenue of
about $2.4 billion. Profit rose 40 percent in
the first quarter. But Lens gets nearly 75
percent of its revenue from Apple and
Samsung, making the company reliant on just
two customers. In May, at the first
shareholders’ meeting since the company went
public, an investor pressed Lens about how it
planned to maintain an edge in a
hypercompetitive market that thrives on
innovation.
Several executives tried to answer the
question. Then Ms. Zhou spoke up, saying she
was prepared to diversify the company’s
business with production facilities geared
toward higher-end glass, as well as sapphire
and ceramic.
After the meeting adjourned, investors piled
into a bus and rode with Ms. Zhou to the Lens
campus, less than a mile away. Ms. Zhou had
sat quietly through much of the shareholders’
meeting, but on the tour of the factory, she
came alive. The shareholders hung on every
word.
In creating a global supplier, Ms. Zhou, 44,
has come to define a new class of female
entrepreneurs in China who have built their
wealth from nearly nothing — a rarity in the
world of business. In Japan, there is not a
single self-made female billionaire, according
to Forbes. In the United States 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 M.I.T. And in a country with
few established players, entrepreneurs like Ms.
Zhou were able to quickly make their mark
when they entered business in the 1990s as
China’s economic engine was revving up.
Ms. 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 C. Malone and Pierre Omidyar,
the founder of eBay.
Ms. Zhou isn’t a celebrity chieftain, like Jack
Ma, the billionaire founder of the e-commerce
giant Alibaba. Few in China had even heard
her name before her company’s public offering
this year. She rarely grants interviews or
makes public appearances.
An elegant woman with a cherubic face,
owlish glasses and a preference for Christian
Dior suits, Ms. Zhou is fastidious and
demanding — “Sit up straight!” she commands
of a general manager during a meeting. Yet
she exudes charm and humility, a quiet
recognition that things could have easily
turned out differently.
“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 wooden statue of Mao and
a 27-inch desktop Mac. “I chose to be in
business, and I don’t regret it.”
Leaning Toward the Obsessive
The youngest of three children, Ms. Zhou was
born in a tiny village in the Hunan Province of
central China, 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 hard-working and talented
student,” Zhong Xiaobai, her former middle-
school teacher, says. “I once read her essay,
‘My Mother,’ aloud in class. It was so moving
it brought everyone to tears.”
Despite her academic focus, Ms. Zhou
dropped out of school at 16 and traveled
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 Shenzhen, making
watch lenses for about $1 a day.
The conditions, she said, were harsh. “I worked
from 8 a.m. to 12 a.m., and sometimes until 2
a.m.,” Ms. Zhou recalled. “There were no
shifts, just a few dozen people, and we all
polished glass. I didn’t enjoy it.”
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, Ms. 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, Ms. 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.
“In the Hunan language, we call women like
her ‘ba de man,’ which means a person who
dares to do what others are afraid to do,” said
her cousin Zhou Xinyi, who helped her open
the workshop and now serves on the Lens
board.
Along the way, Zhou Qunfei married her
former factory boss, had a child and divorced.
She later married a longtime 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 Ms. 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,’ ” Ms. 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 Ms.
Zhou’s company into a dominant position in
China.
After that, Ms. Zhou invested heavily in new
facilities and hired skilled technicians. More
than once, colleagues say, she put up her
apartment as a guarantee for a new bank
loan. Within five years, she had manufacturing
plants under construction in three cities.
“She’s a passionate entrepreneur, and she’s
very hands-on,” says James Hollis, an
executive at Corning, which has a partnership
with Lens Technology. “I’ve watched her
company grow, and her develop a strong
team. Now there are over 100 competitors in
this space, but Lens is a Tier 1 player.”
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
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.
Ms. 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.”
Lens has not experienced the kinds of labor
troubles that have clouded other contract
manufacturers like Foxconn. But current and
former workers say the job is challenging.
Much of the work is done by young women
who inspect glass at different angles, trying to
detect flaws.
“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.”
Expanding a Customer Base
Lens Technology went public in March, as the
Chinese stock market was booming. With the
recent market collapse, the company has lost
45 percent in value, but it is still worth about
$8 billion.
Last year, the company notched revenue of
about $2.4 billion. Profit rose 40 percent in
the first quarter. But Lens gets nearly 75
percent of its revenue from Apple and
Samsung, making the company reliant on just
two customers. In May, at the first
shareholders’ meeting since the company went
public, an investor pressed Lens about how it
planned to maintain an edge in a
hypercompetitive market that thrives on
innovation.
Several executives tried to answer the
question. Then Ms. Zhou spoke up, saying she
was prepared to diversify the company’s
business with production facilities geared
toward higher-end glass, as well as sapphire
and ceramic.
After the meeting adjourned, investors piled
into a bus and rode with Ms. Zhou to the Lens
campus, less than a mile away. Ms. Zhou had
sat quietly through much of the shareholders’
meeting, but on the tour of the factory, she
came alive. The shareholders hung on every
word.
Source :Linda Ikeji's Blog
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