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 below
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.
-The New York Times
