China: Woman Who Once Earned $1.20 a Day Becomes Country’s Richest Woman

BEIJING (International Desk): Zhou Qunfei, founder of smartphone glass maker Lens Technology, has once again been named China’s richest woman. The Hurun Research Institute’s “Hurun Richest Women in China 2026” list, released on October 28, puts her wealth at 127 billion yuan (about $18.9 billion), up 15 percent from last year.
The 56-year-old first topped the list in 2015, when her company listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange. Zhong Huijuan, founder of Hansoh Pharmaceutical, ranks second with 124 billion yuan (about $18.5 billion), just 3 billion yuan behind.
Born in 1970 in a village in China’s Hunan province, Zhou left school as a teenager and moved to Shenzhen, where she worked in a watch-glass factory earning about $1.20 a day. In 1993, aged 23, she opened her own small glass-processing workshop. Her company began supplying glass covers for Apple’s early iPhones in 2007 and listed in Shenzhen in March 2015. Its shares fell in 2018 amid US-China trade tensions, but the firm diversified into electric-vehicle displays, AI hardware and robotics, and added a Hong Kong listing in July 2025.
Hurun attributes her latest rise to growing demand for AI hardware, smart car displays and smart glasses. In May 2026, she was seated between Apple CEO Tim Cook and Tesla chief Elon Musk at a state banquet in Beijing for US President Donald Trump.
The list’s top 50 women hold a combined 1.93 trillion yuan. Of them, 65 percent are self-made, while 35 percent inherited their wealth.