How a Chinese Billionaire Built Her Fortune

[Randy W]

An interesting story, if you want to take the time to read through it. About a woman who made her fortune making the little glass screens for your cell phones - in the NY Times

 

How a Chinese Billionaire Built Her Fortune

 

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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. The Communist Party, under Mao Zedong, promoted gender equality, allowing women to flourish after capitalism started to take hold, according to Huang Yasheng, an expert in China’s entrepreneurial class and a professor of international management at M.I.T. And in a country with few established players, entrepreneurs like Ms. Zhou were able to quickly make their mark when they entered business in the 1990s as China’s economic engine was revving up.

 

Ms. Zhou’s stake in Lens Technology, which went public this year, is worth $7.2 billion. That puts her fortune on par with the media tycoon John C. Malone and Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay.

 

. . .

 

It was the mobile phone that made Ms. Zhou a billionaire.

 

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.

 

“I got this call, and they said, ‘Just answer yes or no, and if the answer’s yes, we’ll help you set up the process,’ ” Ms. Zhou recalled. “I said yes.”

 

Soon after, 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.