No glass ceiling for China’s richest woman
Print Edition
ZHOU Qunfei, chairwoman of Lens Technology, is China’s richest woman with 46.22 billion yuan (US$7.46 billion) in total share holdings.
Her company’s share price surged to 78.08 yuan per share on Tuesday, jumping by the daily limit for 10 straight days since it debuted on the ChiNext growth enterprise market in Shenzhen on March 18, with an offering price of 22.99 yuan per share.
Lens Technology, a major Apple Inc supplier, saw the company’s share value surge by another 10 percent yesterday.
Dubbed as the “Queen of Mobile Phone Glass,” Zhou has ousted Chan Laiwa, founder of Beijing Red Sandalwood Cultural Foundation, who was previously China’s richest woman with total assets of US$6.1 billion, according to a global billionaire list by Forbes released in March.
Lens Technology makes glass covers for various consumer electronic products such as smartphones, computers and cameras. Sales revenue from Apple and Samsung was 9 billion yuan in 2014, taking up more than 70 percent of the company’s total revenue.
Zhou’s life is a classic rags to riches story. Born in 1970 in a small village in Hunan Province, she started working in a factory making glass for watches in Shenzhen.
In 2003, she founded her own company headquartered in Hunan. The company has now grown to include 10 subsidiary firms with locations all over China, and employs 60,000 people.
Zhou has kept a low profile in the past decade. She once told the press that she attributed her success to “hard work” and “persistence.”
Despite the company’s good performance in the stock market, analysts have also expressed some concern about its ability to sustain profit. From a net profit of 2 billion yuan in 2012, the company saw it drop to 1.17 billion yuan in 2014. The company blamed the drop to a slump in the gross profits of mobile phone glass covers.
Lens Technology is also highly reliant on major clients such as Apple and Samsung. Between 2012 and 2014, the combined sales to the two giants took up over 70 percent of the company’s entire sales revenue.
Lens Technology said in its prospectus that it will see profit fall by 50 percent if there is any fluctuation in the supplies to Apple or Samsung.
Nevertheless, the company has announced recently that it provides glass for Apple’s newly launched Apple Watch. It can be foreseen that the richest woman will continue to keep her mobile phone glass kingdom ticking.
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