Eva Mayr-Stihl, businesswoman, philanthropist and entrepreneur, sadly passed away on the 9th of April 2022. She was instrumental in the success of the company and spent 33 years guiding the family-owned business as a member of its senior management team.
Throughout her years on the Advisory Board and the Supervisory Board, she kept close watch over the strategic direction of the company. Mrs Mayr-Stihl joined her father’s company in 1960 and used her educational background in business administration and linguistics to take on responsibility for advertising and market research.
Along with her three siblings, she was made a limited partner in 1961 and 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, Mrs Mayr-Stihl became deputy chairwoman of the Board of Management, placing her in charge of finance and control starting in 1975.
Alongside her work with Stihl, Mrs Mayr-Stihl was a keen philanthropist. In 1986, she and her husband Robert Mayr established the Andreas Stihl Foundation, a nonprofit which was renamed the Eva Mayr-Stihl Foundation in 2004.
The foundation was set up to finance projects in animal welfare, education, science research, arts and culture. Today it supports a variety of programmes, including an endowed professorship for forest genetics at the University of Freiburg and a research group on recyclable material cycles.
On the 11th of November 2009, Mrs Mayr-Stihl received the Konrad Adenauer Foundation’s Social Market Economy Award at St Paul’s church in Frankfurt. 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, she was named an Honorary Senator of the University of Freiburg.