Zhou Qunfei, owner of Lens Technology, now China´s richest woman, is yet another rags-to-richest story from China. Ambition and success have been on her path, tells Hurun China´s rich list founder Rupert Hoogewerf to the Australian Financial Review. Ambition and taking risk is what most rich women have in common, he says.
The Financial Review:
Rupert Hoogewerf, founder of Hurun, who has spent most of the past 18 years in China researching the country’s wealthy, says driven, ambitious risk-takers such as Zhou, regardless of their gender, thrived as China opened up its economy to the world in the 1980s and 1990s, and all of a sudden people were allowed and even encouraged to make money.
“Women here have a lot of ambition,” says the 45-year-old, who studied Chinese language and history in Britain before moving to Shanghai and setting up Hurun, which has become the definitive source of fortune rankings in the country.
“This group of women at the top is representative of a much larger base of women entrepreneurs underneath, and that’s where the real story is. I don’t feel that same sense of entrepreneurship among my female friends in Britain or even, in some cases, in the US. There is this sense that there is an opportunity to be seized here. Let’s just go for it.”…
“It turned out that [she is] probably the most successful self-made woman in the world,” Hoogewerf says. “This is somebody that nobody in the world knew about this time last year. It’s a phenomenal story.”
More in the Australian Financial Review.
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