Zhou Qunfei

Zhou Qunfei was born in 1970 in a village in Hunan province, the youngest of three children. Her mother died when she was five, and her father, a former soldier, had been partly blinded and lost a finger in an industrial accident. As a child she raised pigs and ducks to help feed the family and did well at school, but at sixteen the money ran out and she left to find work.

In Shenzhen, the new industrial zone near Hong Kong, she took a job in a small factory making watch glass, on shifts that ran from morning until late at night for about a pound a day. She has said she chose it because it was near Shenzhen University, whose evening classes she took in accounting, computing and customs procedures. She tried to quit after three months; her resignation letter was so well written that the boss promoted her instead.

In 1993, aged 22, she started her own workshop with her brother, sister, cousins and their savings of roughly 20,000 Hong Kong dollars, polishing watch glass in a three-bedroom flat. She learned to fix the machines herself when they broke. In 2003 the mobile phone industry was moving from plastic screens to glass, and she won an order from Motorola for the Razr, founding Lens Technology to fulfil it.

Apple followed. The firm's factories in Hunan employ tens of thousands, and when it listed on the Shenzhen stock exchange in 2015 she became, on paper, the richest self-made woman in the world. She has said the label sits oddly with her, as someone who still remembers what a day's wages could buy.