Zhou Qunfei, a former factory worker who once earned about Rs 100 a day, is now China’s richest woman, with a fortune of 127 billion yuan, roughly Rs 1.8 lakh crore, according to Hurun’s 2026 list of the country’s wealthiest women. The 56-year-old founder of Lens Technology overtook Zhong Huijuan, the head of Hansoh Pharmaceutical, to take the top spot.

Her story starts far from boardrooms. Born in 1970 in Hunan province, Zhou left school as a teenager and moved to the city of Shenzhen to find work. She joined a watch glass factory as a laborer, paid around Rs 100 a day.

She did not stay on the factory floor for long. At 23, she started her own glass processing unit. There she learned screen printing and the technique of making curved glass. Those skills, not a big bank loan or a famous family name, became the foundation of everything that followed.

From a single workshop to a glass empire

Zhou built on that craft by founding Lens Technology, a glass manufacturing company that supplied screens for smartphones. It was a crowded, demanding business, and it rewarded people who could make precise, high-volume glass work.

The iPhone changed everything. In 2007, Lens Technology began supplying glass covers for Apple’s first iPhone. The company turned a corner and moved firmly into profit. Between 2011 and 2014, glass sales tied to iPhones brought in profits that the company had not expected.

Going public made her a fortune. In 2015, Lens Technology listed its shares on the Shenzhen stock market. Zhou’s wealth grew sharply with the listing. The same year, she was recognized as China’s richest woman for the first time.

A setback that forced a reinvention

The good run did not last without a jolt. In 2018, the US-China trade war and worries about Apple’s sales weighed on Lens Technology’s shares. The company’s share price fell.

Rather than stay tied to a single product, Zhou pushed the company into new sectors. Lens Technology expanded beyond smartphone screens into electric vehicles, hardware linked to artificial intelligence, and robotics. Today the company works across all of those areas alongside its core glass business.

That shift matters for the story. A company that once depended on one client and one device now has its name attached to some of the most closely watched technology bets in the market. For the founder, it was a way to keep growing after the iPhone-driven boom cooled.

Back at the top of the rich list

According to the Hurun report on the richest women of 2026, Zhou’s fortune climbed to 127 billion yuan. That is about Rs 1.8 lakh crore in Indian currency. Her wealth rose 15 percent compared with the previous year, which is what pushed her past Zhong Huijuan for the number one position.

From earning around Rs 100 a day as a factory hand in Shenzhen to leading China’s list of wealthy women, Zhou Qunfei’s rise is built on hard work and persistence.

The list also says something about how wealth is being created in China right now. According to Hurun, 65 percent of the 50 richest women in China built their fortunes on their own. Together, their wealth reached a record 1.93 trillion yuan. Zhou is one of the clearest examples of that trend, having arrived in the top tier without inherited money.

Her ranking on the wider list is also notable. Zhou and her husband placed 33rd on Hurun’s overall list of the country’s rich. At the very top of that ranking, ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming remains in first place with a fortune of 670 billion yuan.

The arc of Zhou Qunfei’s life is simple to state and hard to repeat. A teenager who left school became a laborer, then a business owner at 23, then the head of a company that built screens for the world’s most famous phone. Each step came from a skill she had mastered and a willingness to shift when the market shifted. The numbers now sitting next to her name are the result of that long sequence, not a single lucky break.