Life in Corporate
World can change too suddenly – often there are people rising to higher
echelons while many remain low … a ‘glass ceiling’ is a metaphor – of the
unseen, yet unbreakable barrier that stops people from rising to upper rungs,
despite possessing qualification and capability.
A different glass -
Lens Technology is a $7.2B worth glass screen business in China. The company
provides glass screens to top labels like Samsung, Windows and Apple and had
made a public offer in March……and this is the story of a successful self-made
female billionaire in the world, comparatively few people have ever heard of
her. She is a school dropout (by
economic necessity), former factory worker — and founder and CEO of Lens
Technologies, the woman 45, grew up in a tiny village in China, lost her mother
at age 5; her father was nearly blind
after an industrial accident.
She is - Zhou
Qunfei whose Lens Technology, made a public listing on the
Shenzhen ChiNext market in March 2015, raised her net worth to US$10 billion, making her the richest woman in
China. In her younger days, Zhou pitched
in to help raise and sell her family’s pigs and ducks. After years of intense
and often dull work, Zhou wisely leveraged her experiences working with glass
into her own company. “In the Hunan language, we call women like her ‘ba de
man,’ which means a person who dares to do what others are afraid to do,” her
cousin Zhou Xinyi told the New York Times. When Zhou’s fastidiousness,
intelligence, and diligence met the mobile phone boom, her company rocketed her
to tremendous success. She became a top glass supplier for Apple and Samsung.
Zhou’s stake in Lens Technology is worth $7.2 billion, but she remains humble
and diligent, remembering her path from farmer to factory-owner.
Zhou Qunfei jets off to Silicon Valley and Seoul, South
Korea, to court executives at Apple and Samsung, her two biggest customers. She
has played host to President Xi Jinping of China, when he visited her company’s
headquarters. NY Times in an interesting
article writes that she seems most at
home pacing the floor of her state-of-the-art factory, tinkering. She’ll dip
her hands into a tray of water, to determine whether the temperature is just
right. She can explain the intricacies of heating glass in a potassium ion
bath. When she passes a grinding machine, she is apt to ask technicians to step
aside so she can take their place for a while. Ms. Zhou knows the drill. For
years, she labored in a factory, the best job she could get having grown up in
an impoverished village in central China.
“She’ll sometimes
sit down and work as an operator to see if there’s anything wrong with the
process,” said James Zhao, a general manager at Lens Technology. “That will put
me in a very awkward position. If there’s a problem, she’d say, ‘Why didn’t you
see that?’ ”
It is a fairytale
reading about her meteoric rise from disturbed childhood when she had to help
her family raise pigs and ducks for food and additional money. Ms. Zhou has honed her hands-on knowledge into
a world-class, multibillion-dollar operation, one at the vanguard of China’s
push into high-end manufacturing. The glass screens, each refined to a fraction of a
millimetre, is an industry that requires highly sophisticated technology,” –
and the thin 0.5 millimeters is really a
task.
In creating a
global supplier, Ms. Zhou, 44, has come to define a new class of female
entrepreneurs in China who have built their wealth from nearly nothing — a
rarity in the world of business. In Japan, there is not a single self-made
female billionaire, according to Forbes. In the United States and Europe, most
women who are billionaires secured their wealth through inheritance. No country
has more self-made female billionaires than China.
Ms. Zhou isn’t a
celebrity chieftain, like Jack Ma, the billionaire founder of the e-commerce
giant Alibaba. Few in China had even heard her name before her company’s public
offering this year. She rarely grants interviews or makes public appearances. An elegant woman with a cherubic face, owlish
glasses and a preference for Christian Dior suits, Ms. Zhou is fastidious and
demanding — “Sit up straight!” she commands of a general manager during a
meeting. Yet she exudes charm and humility, a quiet recognition that things
could have easily turned out differently.
“In the village
where I grew up, a lot of girls didn’t have a choice of whether to go to middle
school. They would get engaged or married and spend their entire life in that
village,” she said in an interview at her office “I chose to be in business,
and I don’t regret it.” She dreamt of becoming a fashion designer, landed a job on a factory floor in the city
of Shenzhen, making watch lenses for about $1 a day. The conditions were harsh
and extended hours of work were not enjoyable.
After few months, she chose to quit and wrote to her boss complaining of
the hours of work and boredom. Even so, she expressed her gratitude for the job,
saying she wanted to learn more. The letter impressed the factory chief, who
told her the plant was about to adopt new processes. He asked her to stay,
offering her a promotion. It was the first of several over the next three
years. In 1993, Ms. Zhou, then 22,
decided to set out on her own. With $3,000 in savings, she and several
relatives started their own workshop next door. They lured customers with the
promise of even higher-quality watch lenses. At the new company, Ms. Zhou did
it all. She repaired and designed factory machinery. She taught herself complex
screen-printing processes and difficult techniques that allowed her to improve
prints for curved glass. Along the way, Zhou Qunfei married her former factory
boss, had a child and divorced. She later married a longtime factory colleague,
who serves on the Lens board, and had a second child.
Her work habits
lean toward the obsessive. Her company’s headquarters is at one of her
manufacturing plants in Changsha. In her spacious office, a door behind her
desk opens into a small apartment, ensuring she can roam the factory floor day
or night. In 2003, she was still making
glass for watches when she received an unexpected phone call from executives at
Motorola. They asked if she was willing to help them develop a glass screen for
their new device, the Razr V3. At the time, the display screens on most mobile
phones were made of plastic. Motorola wanted a glass display that would be more
resistant to scratches and provide sharper images for text messages, photos and
multimedia. Zhou responded positively
and soon orders started rolling in from other mobile-phone makers like HTC,
Nokia and Samsung. Then, in 2007, Apple entered the market with the iPhone,
which had a keyboard-enabled glass touch screen that rewrote the rules of the
game for mobile devices. Apple picked Lens as its supplier, propelling Ms.
Zhou’s company into a dominant position in China. After that, Ms. Zhou invested
heavily in new facilities and hired skilled technicians. More than once, colleagues
say, she put up her apartment as a guarantee for a new bank loan. Within five
years, she had manufacturing plants under construction in three cities.
Lens operates round
the clock, with 75,000 workers spread across three main manufacturing
facilities that occupy about 800 acres in the Changsha region. Each day, the
company receives bulk shipments of glass from global manufacturers like Corning
in the United States and Asahi Glass in Japan. The glass is cut, ground down to
size, bored and polished to give each plate a transparent finish. Then the
plates are strengthened in a potassium ion bath, painted and cured. Finally,
they are cleaned and coated with anti-smudge and anti-reflection films. Ms.
Zhou designs and choreographs nearly every step of the process, a
detailed-oriented approach she traces to her childhood. “My father had lost his
eyesight, so if we placed something somewhere, it had to be in the right spot,
exactly, or something could go wrong,” she said. “That’s the attention to
detail I demand at the workplace.”
Lens has not
experienced the kinds of labour troubles that have clouded other contract
manufacturers like Foxconn. But current and former workers say the job is
challenging. Much of the work is done by young women who inspect glass at different
angles, trying to detect flaws.
NY Times reports
that at the first shareholders’ meeting
since the company went public, an investor pressed Lens about how it planned to
maintain an edge in a hypercompetitive market that thrives on innovation. Several
executives tried to answer the question. Then Ms. Zhou spoke up, saying she was
prepared to diversify the company’s business with production facilities geared
toward higher-end glass, as well as sapphire and ceramic. After the meeting
adjourned, investors piled into a bus and rode with Ms. Zhou to the Lens
campus, less than a mile away. Ms. Zhou had sat quietly through much of the
shareholders’ meeting, but on the tour of the factory, she came alive. The
shareholders hung on every word.
Remarkable story
that could motivate people.
With regards – S.
Sampathkumar
12th Aug
2015.
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