Zhou Qunfei
Source of wealth: Smartphone screens
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Modules
Biography
Zhou Qunfei is the chairman of Lens Technology, a touch screen maker whose customers include Apple, Samsung and Huawei.
It also supplies to electric vehicle makers such as Tesla and BYD.
A migrant factory worker as a teenager, Zhou has gone on to become one of the world's richest self-made women.
Lens Technology went public on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange in 2015, 22 years after she founded the company. It had a dual listing in Hong Kong in July 2025.
Zhou first took the plunge as an entrepreneur in 1993 when she set up a watch parts company, the precursor of Lens, with relatives in an apartment in Shenzhen.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Zhou Qunfei
Billionaires are often presented under the romantic myth of the 'self-made person': a narrative designed to justify opulence as the natural reward for hard work, effort, or ingenuity. However, when confronting such extreme volumes of wealth with macroeconomic reality, the meritocracy narrative completely breaks down. No individual can legitimately generate through personal effort a fortune equivalent to millions of times the average working-class salary. Capital at the top does not grow because of exceptional talent; it expands through an implacable dynamic where accumulated money works exponentially faster than people, devouring the wealth generated by productive labor.
The immense fortune of Zhou Qunfei, linked to Technology and 'Smartphone screens', has not been built in a free-market vacuum, but through rent-seeking, the use of exclusive elite influence, the consolidation of monopoly positions, or inherited wealth. Far from taking real private risks, billionaire empires structurally depend on state support through direct subsidies, infrastructure use, exploitation of R&D, public contracts, and offshore tax engineering. While this wealth is equivalent to the physical weight of 125 tons of pure gold, the rest of the planet suffers from an artificial scarcity of basic resources. The fact that this wealth is enough to fully fund the public health system of DR Congo, a country with more than 105800000 million inhabitants for 7.9 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.