On 27 October the Hurun Rich List put Zhou Qunfei at RMB 127 billion, making her China’s richest woman and displacing last year’s holder Zhong Huijuan. With her husband Zheng Junlong, the household figure is RMB 128 billion, ranking 33rd overall.
Two days earlier, the company she chairs published third-quarter results. Lens Technology’s first nine months showed revenue of RMB 47.902 billion, down 10.74 per cent, and net profit attributable to shareholders of RMB 1.420 billion, down 50.06 per cent. Excluding non-recurring items, profit fell by more than 60 per cent.
The list is a September photograph
Hurun values companies as of 1 September. By the time the list was published, the market had moved: Lens Technology’s A-shares fell about 28.7 per cent between 1 September and 27 October, and its Hong Kong listing lost more than 40 per cent.
So the title and the decline arrived together. That is not a contradiction, it is a timing artefact, and it happens to sit on top of a real deterioration.
One customer is still the model
Zhou started in 1993 with a rented three-room flat in Shenzhen, cutting glass for watches. The break came when phone makers began looking for a harder window material than acrylic, and her watch-glass process transferred. Lens Technology was founded in 2003, certified as an Apple supplier in 2006 and 2007, and rode the iPhone.
Revenue went from RMB 890 million in 2009 to RMB 17.2 billion in 2015, the year it listed on ChiNext and Zhou first became China’s richest woman. In 2023, sales to Apple accounted for 57.83 per cent of total revenue.
She has described her expansion logic as a hotel theory: you do not wait for guests to arrive before building the hotel. It fits consumer electronics, where a large customer will not wait for a supplier to add capacity after the order lands. It also means depreciation and payroll arrive before the revenue does.
The profit fall is not a glass problem
Read the segment data and the story changes. In the first half of 2026, smartphone and computer revenue fell 17.67 per cent to RMB 22.382 billion, still 77.54 per cent of the total, while gross margin in that segment rose 2.99 percentage points to 16.17 per cent on a better product and customer mix.
What broke the bottom line was everything below the gross profit line. Foreign-exchange results swung from a RMB 115 million gain to a RMB 654 million loss, a RMB 769 million move. Administrative expenses rose 8.35 per cent to RMB 2.279 billion. Revenue shrank while some costs grew.
The result is a net margin under 3 per cent on a business with hundreds of billions of renminbi in revenue.
The expansion has not stopped
Capital expenditure on long-term assets was RMB 7.681 billion in the nine months, up about 18 per cent. Inventory reached RMB 9.360 billion, up 35.02 per cent from the start of the year. Short-term borrowings rose to RMB 1.824 billion and long-term borrowings to RMB 8.317 billion, while operating cash flow fell 19.35 per cent.
Lens attributes the inventory build to seasonal stocking and the borrowing to working capital and new projects. Nothing in those numbers says crisis. But revenue falling while inventory, debt and long-term investment all rise means the room to manoeuvre is narrowing.
The next businesses are small
Diversification has been underway for years. Automotive displays and smart cockpit components brought in RMB 3.372 billion in the first half, up 6.56 per cent. Smart headsets and wearables added RMB 1.777 billion, up 7.95 per cent. Both are growing and neither is large enough to cover the phone decline.
The segment that includes embodied intelligence grew 46.92 per cent, from a base of RMB 534 million, or 1.85 per cent of revenue.
On 16 October the company agreed to pay USD 25 million for 59.78 per cent of PMG, whose Zhejiang Yuanshi subsidiary makes AI server racks and structural components and holds Nvidia supplier certification. It is also discussing glass substrate advanced packaging with Intel.
Those are the right directions. They are also the same bet as before, which is to build capacity around a small number of very large customers before the orders are certain. Zhou is 56 and has run this play for 33 years. The exposure that produced a RMB 127 billion fortune is the exposure that just halved a profit.
Editor’s note: This is an adapted translation of the original Sohu Tech report. It has been trimmed and restructured for readability for an international business audience. The full original (in Chinese) is at https://www.sohu.com/a/1094356053_500856.