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Lens Technology founder Zhou Qunfei
rags to riches
China's richest woman went from the factory floor to a billion-dollar fortune
Zhou Qunfei made her money selling tech companies touchscreen glass.
4.05pm, 1 Apr 2015
27.0k
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A FORMER FACTORY worker who founded a company supplying Apple, Samsung and other technological giants with touchscreen glass has become China’s richest woman, reports said, with a fortune surpassing $8 billion.
The wealth of Zhou Qunfei, chairwoman and president of Hunan-based Lens Technology, soared after the firm’s debut on the Shenzhen stock exchange last month, after which its shares surged by their daily limit for 10 consecutive days.
She claimed the title yesterday, Forbes reported. Zhou worked as a factory girl at a different glass company before starting her own business in 2003.
Now 45, she owns an 89% stake in the firm, which had more than 80,000 employees and revenue of $3.3 billion in 2013, according to Bloomberg.
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It put her wealth at $7.6 billion yesterday – before the shares went up another 10% today.
Big in glass
Lens primarily makes touch-sensitive glass covers for mobile phones, computers and cameras. According to the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post, its covers are used in nearly 21% of the world’s smartphones.
AP Photo / Ahn Young-joon
AP Photo / Ahn Young-joon / Ahn Young-joon
China’s unprecedented economic boom has turned it into the world’s second-largest economy and raised hundreds of millions out of poverty, but has also created huge income disparities and rampant corruption, with only a relative few accruing vast wealth.
The number of dollar billionaires in mainland China passed 300 in 2013, according to the Hurun Report, a luxury magazine publisher.
Baz we’re talking about China, stories like this are not the American dream of rags to riches, in communist China they are the result of the ubiquitous corruption.
An article in the Sunday Times in 2011 caused uproar on sites like Mumsnet. The basic jist of the article was that the women who had succeeded did it by sheer determination and didn’t go around whining about glass ceilings, gender quotas and childcare. Their children by and large were cared for by their grandparents and one mother only saw her children only every 2 weeks. Most of them worked 10 hours a day 6-7 days a week. One of them was quoted as wondering why western women wanted everything. They wanted a well paid high end job and children at the same time with someone else to pay or subsidise the childcare. The women went on to say that in her view you either had a job or a family but you couldn’t have both.
Needless to saw it made for very interesting reading on social media over the next few days.
That’s not my point Joanna and BTW a lot of men would love to spend more time with their children but can’t due to work pressures. Shift work, overnights and long hours on the road mean that they can’t spend more than a few hours a week with their children so it’s not all rosy for men either.
I love the ridicule of china at the end. You should look at where china sits on the ranking of income inequality when compared to other countries. Ireland is 46th, China is 67th and the US is 96th (according to the world banks figures).
Interesting that….. problem is China is not communist. At some stage there could be revolution western style. The richer they get the more freedoms they will want.
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