Zhou Qunfei
| Zhou Qunfei | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1970 Xiangxiang, Hunan, China |
| Nationality | Chinese (Hong Kong resident) |
| Education | Part-time study at Shenzhen University |
| Occupation | Entrepreneur, manufacturer |
| Company | Lens Technology |
| Title | Founder and chairwoman, Lens Technology |
| Net worth | US$18.2 billion (2026) |
| Spouse | Zheng Junlong (m. 2008) |
| Children | 2 |
Zhou Qunfei (周群飞; born 1970) is a Chinese entrepreneur, the founder and chairwoman of Lens Technology, the world's largest manufacturer of touchscreen cover glass. After the company's listing on the Shenzhen ChiNext market in March 2015 her net worth reached ten billion dollars, making her the richest woman in China. As of 2026 Forbes estimates her wealth at 18.2 billion dollars, placing her among the wealthiest self-made women in the world.
Zhou left school at sixteen to work on a factory production line in Shenzhen and built, over three decades, the company that supplies the glass on the front of a substantial share of the world's smartphones. Her trajectory from migrant worker to industrialist is among the most frequently told business stories in China, and Lens Technology occupies a position in the global electronics supply chain that few outside the industry recognise despite its scale.
Early life
Zhou Qunfei was born in 1970 in Xiangxiang, a county-level city in Hunan province, the youngest of three children in a poor rural family. Before her birth her father, a former soldier, had been partially blinded and had lost a finger in an industrial accident during the 1960s. A skilled craftsman despite his injuries, he supported the household by making bamboo baskets and chairs and repairing bicycles. Her mother died when Zhou was five. As a child she helped raise animals for the family's own consumption and for small sale.
She was the only one of the three siblings to attend secondary school and was regarded as a capable student, but she left at sixteen and moved in with her uncle's family to become a migrant worker in Shenzhen, the special economic zone in Guangdong province that was then absorbing millions of workers from the interior. She briefly considered seeking a government job for its security and discarded the idea, judging that the absence of a diploma would make it impractical.
In Shenzhen she chose deliberately to work for companies located near Shenzhen University so that she could take evening and part-time courses there. Over several years she studied a wide range of subjects and passed qualifying examinations in accounting, computer operations and customs processing. She also obtained a commercial vehicle driving licence. The pattern of acquiring formal credentials while working full time on a production line shaped both her own progress and, later, the training arrangements she instituted at her factories.
Career
Watch components
Although she had wanted to become a fashion designer, Zhou took a job with a small family-run firm making watch parts, earning about 180 yuan a month. Dissatisfied with the working conditions, she decided after three months to leave and submitted a letter of resignation that set out her reasons while thanking the firm for the opportunity. The letter impressed the factory chief sufficiently that he offered her a promotion instead of accepting it.
When that factory eventually closed, Zhou started her own business in 1993 at the age of 22, using savings of 20,000 Hong Kong dollars, roughly 3,000 United States dollars. Her cousin had encouraged her to work for herself. The company began with her brother, her sister, their spouses and two cousins all working from a three-bedroom apartment, and competed by promising watch lenses of higher quality than the prevailing standard.
Zhou involved herself in every part of the operation, including machine repair and the redesign of factory equipment, an approach to process engineering that remained characteristic of her management. In 2001 the company won a substantial contract to make mobile phone screens for the Chinese electronics manufacturer TCL Corporation, its first move beyond watches.
Zhou has said that she has founded eleven companies over the course of her career.
Lens Technology
In 2003, while still producing watch faces, Zhou's business received a request from Motorola to develop glass screens for the Razr V3. The timing was fortunate: the mobile phone industry was then in the middle of a transition from plastic to glass display covers, a change that required manufacturing capabilities few suppliers possessed.
She founded Lens Technology the same year, choosing the English name so that the company would appear in the results of potential customers searching for the word lens. Orders followed from HTC, Nokia and Samsung Electronics. The decisive contract came with Apple's entry into the mobile market in 2007, when Lens produced cover glass for the first iPhone, and from that point the company became the dominant supplier in its category.
Lens Technology today supplies touchscreen cover glass principally to Apple, Samsung and Huawei, with Apple and Samsung together accounting for nearly 75 per cent of revenue. The Apple Watch uses the company's glass and sapphire crystal screens. As of 2017 the company employed approximately 90,000 people across 32 factory sites and was expected to produce more than a billion glass screens in the year.
Listing
Lens Technology began trading on the ChiNext A-share market of the Shenzhen Stock Exchange on 18 March 2015, the 22nd anniversary of the founding of Zhou's first company. The stock rose by the market's 44 per cent daily limit on the first day and by ten per cent on each of the following thirteen trading days, through 2 April. It was the largest Chinese technology flotation of the first quarter of 2015.
Zhou held 87.9 per cent of the shares, a stake valued at 7.2 billion dollars as of July 2015. The listing raised her net worth by 452 per cent and displaced Chen Lihua as the richest woman in China. She was also identified as the wealthiest self-made woman in the world and one of the richest women in the technology sector.
Recognition
Forbes ranked Zhou 61st on its 2016 Power Women list, 205th on its 2016 list of billionaires, 18th on the 2015 China Rich List and 30th on its 2015 list of the richest people in technology. Fortune placed her 18th on its 2016 list of the most powerful women in the Asia-Pacific region, where she was a new entrant. Bloomberg has ranked her 211th among the world's billionaires.
In May 2026 Zhou attended the state banquet given by the Chinese leader Xi Jinping for the United States president Donald Trump during his visit to China. She was seated between Tim Cook of Apple and Elon Musk of Tesla, both customers of Lens Technology, an arrangement widely read as a deliberate signal about the position of Chinese component manufacturers in American technology supply chains.
Controversies
Labour conditions
Lens Technology has been the subject of repeated reporting on conditions in its factories. Investigations by labour rights organisations and by international media have alleged excessive overtime, inadequate protective equipment in glass cutting and polishing operations, and exposure to chemicals used in processing. The company has stated that it complies with Chinese labour law and with the supplier codes of its customers, and Apple's supplier responsibility reports have recorded both audit findings at Lens facilities and subsequent remediation.
The criticism carries particular weight given Zhou's own history as a production line worker, a contrast frequently drawn in Chinese and Western coverage alike. Her defenders point to training programmes and internal promotion pathways she has instituted, which reflect her own route out of the line.
Xinjiang labour transfer allegations
In 2020 a report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute named Lens Technology among Chinese manufacturers that had received workers transferred from Xinjiang under state labour programmes. Lens Technology denied any use of forced labour. Apple stated that it had found no evidence of forced labour in its supply chain following its own investigation. The allegations contributed to wider scrutiny in the United States and Europe of electronics supply chains with exposure to Xinjiang, and to subsequent import restrictions affecting a range of Chinese manufacturers.
Customer concentration
Analysts have persistently identified the dependence of Lens Technology on two customers, Apple and Samsung, as the principal structural risk to the business. The concentration gives those customers substantial pricing power, and the company's margins have fluctuated with their product cycles. Zhou has pursued diversification into automotive glass and other cover applications in response.
Personal life
Zhou married her former factory employer, with whom she had a daughter, and later divorced. In 2008 she married Zheng Junlong, a colleague from the factory who has served on the board of Lens Technology. They have a son who lives at the family home in Hong Kong.
She has said that she regards work as her hobby, but also enjoys mountain climbing and table tennis. Asked in an interview with Gansu Television for the secret of her success, she answered that it was the desire to learn.
Her career has been widely presented in China as an inspiration to the country's migrant workers, and she is among the most prominent examples of the self-made entrepreneurs who emerged from the Shenzhen manufacturing economy of the 1990s.
See also
References