Meet Zhou Qunfei: the woman seated between Cook and Musk at China state banquet

Several Chinese business leaders attended the banquet alongside US executives and officials, including Hisense chairman Jia Shaoqian, Wanxiang Group chairman Lu Weiding, Fuyao Glass chairman Cao Hui, Air China chairman Liu Tiexiang, Comac chairman He Dongfeng, Lenovo chairman Yang Yuanqing, Xiaomi founder Lei Jun, Haier chairman Zhou Yunjie, and ByteDance chief executive Liang Rubo, according to footage broadcast by CCTV and media reports.

Zhou Qunfei, born in 1970 to a poor family in a village in Hunan province, left school at 15 and moved to Shenzhen to work in factories. In 1993, at the age of 23, she gathered several relatives and started a small business in a residential building in the city’s Bao’an district, focusing on screen printing on wristwatch glass. A decade later, Lens Technology was established.

Partnering with Apple, the company took off. Lens won a spot in Apple’s supply chain in 2007 as a cover glass provider, just as the iPhone was about to reshape the smartphone industry. As the iPhone scaled globally, Apple became Lens’s largest customer, accounting for more than half of its annual revenue in the early 2010s.

Lens listed on Shenzhen’s tech-heavy ChiNext Index in March 2015, making Zhou one of China’s richest self-made women. The company went public in Hong Kong in 2025.

Lens’s Shenzhen-listed shares closed at 32.21 yuan on Friday, up nearly 5.9 per cent, valuing it at 180.6 billion yuan (US$26.6 billion).

_{Meet Zhou Qunfei: the woman seated between Cook and Musk at China state banquet}

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