STIHL GB remembers Eva Mayr-Stihl

Eva Mayr-Stihl, a businesswoman, philanthropist and dedicated entrepreneur passed away on the 9th April 2022. Mayr-Stihl was instrumental in the success of STIHL and spent 33 years guiding the family-owned business as a member of its senior management team. 

Throughout her many years of service on the Advisory Board and the Supervisory Board, she kept close watch over the strategic direction of the company. Mayr-Stihl joined her father’s company in 1960, and with her educational background in business administration and linguistics, she took on responsibility for advertising and market research at the family-owned enterprise. 

Her expertise and drive to assume a leading role at the company quickly bore fruit when she and her three siblings were made limited partners in 1961. Two years later, her father gave her the power to represent the firm and enter into transactions on its behalf. After her father’s death in 1973, Mayr-Stihl became Deputy Chairwoman of the Board of Management, placing her in charge of finance and controlling starting in 1975. 

With a keen sense of responsibility toward society and a sustainable world, the second mainstay in Mayr-Stihl’s life was her work as a philanthropist. In 1986, she and her husband Robert Mayr established the Andreas Stihl Foundation, a nonprofit organisation that would be renamed the Eva Mayr-Stihl Foundation in 2004. 

The foundation was set up to finance projects in the fields of animal welfare, education, science, research, the arts, and culture. Today, the institution supports a variety of programs, including an endowed professorship for forest genetics at the University of Freiburg and a research group on recyclable material cycles. 

On 11th November 2009, Mayr-Stihl received the Konrad Adenauer Foundation’s Social Market Economy Award at St. Paul’s church in Frankfurt am Main. In 2011, she received the 1st Class Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany and became the first woman to receive the key to the city of Waiblingen. In 2019, Mayr-Stihl was named an Honorary Senator of the University of Freiburg.

The people of STIHL and their families are deeply saddened by the death of Mayr-Stihl.