At this US visit to China dinner, the most eye-catching person sitting in the center between Musk and Cook was Zhou Qunfei, the founder of Lens Technology.

At this US🇺🇸 visit to China🇨🇳 dinner, the most eye-catching person sitting in the center between Musk and Cook was Zhou Qunfei, the founder of Lens Technology.

From a rural migrant worker to China🇨🇳’s richest woman, she started from scratch with absolutely no background. She was born in a small village in Hunan.

Her mother died when she was five, and her father went blind due to a work injury.

The family was destitute. At 16, unable to pay tuition, she was forced to drop out of school and go to Guangdong to work.

She worked on a factory assembly line grinding glass, working during the day and studying intensely at night, obtaining skill certificates such as accounting and computer operation certificates.

After several years, she used the 20,000 yuan she had saved from working to open a small workshop in Shenzhen with eight relatives, including her older brother, sister-in-law, and brother-in-law, processing watch glass. She single-handedly repaired the machines and handled sales, working like this for another four years.

After 2000, the mobile phone industry began to develop on a large scale. By chance, her watch glass factory received an order for mobile phone screens from TCL.

Seeing the huge potential of the mobile phone glass market, she quickly established Lens Technology, specializing in the production, R&D, and sales of mobile phone glass. Initially, they only produced domestic and counterfeit phones.

However, when they tried to secure an order from Motorola, the foreign company had very strict quality requirements.

She staked almost all her resources on cooperating with Motorola and won the V3 order, which sold over 100 million units globally. This directly propelled Lens Technology to a leading position in the industry, and subsequently, they successfully secured orders from Nokia, Samsung, and other foreign companies.

A crucial turning point came in 2007 when Steve Jobs released the first iPhone, revolutionizing mobile phones with all-glass touchscreens.

Jobs’ demanding manufacturing requirements were unmatched globally, and Zhou Qunfei astutely recognized this as a huge opportunity. She led her team in a three-month collaborative effort with Apple engineers, overcoming key technological challenges and successfully mass-producing the first-generation iPhone’s glass panel.

This secured a long-term contract with Apple, leading to Lens Technology supplying almost all subsequent Apple devices, including iPads and MacBooks.

This also helped Lens Technology become the largest company in the region in the touchscreen glass panel field.

This explains why she sits next to Tim Cook, but why does Elon Musk sit next to her?

After achieving global leadership in glass panels, Lens Technology began diversifying into more intelligent devices, including automotive cockpits and robots. In the automotive sector, it has secured contracts with 30 automakers, including Tesla, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, and Li Auto, for components such as windows and center consoles. In the robotics sector, it primarily focuses on joints and sensors—all areas that deeply overlap with Musk’s business.

A girl who dropped out of school at 15 with only a junior high school diploma, started from scratch in rural Hunan and became China’s richest woman. Forty years later, she entered the Sino-US talks and sat between Musk and Kuznets. This is the story of Zhou Qunfei.