Meyra

Meyra GmbH
legal form	Company with limited liability
founding	1936
Seat	Kalletal - Kalldorf , Germany
management	Michal Perner; Piotr Baczinsky; Pavel Robak; Friedrich Kottmeier; Frank Benjamin McDowell;
Number of employees	208
sales	39.340 million euros (2018)
Branch	Elevators , automobile manufacturers
Website	www.meyra.de

Meyra in Kalldorf

The Meyra GmbH is a German company based in the municipality Kalletal ( Lippe , North Rhine-Westphalia ). It is one of the market leaders in the premium wheelchair segment. The company produces and sells wheelchairs and rehabilitation aids of all kinds for the disabled , the elderly and people with restricted mobility. The articles are used in the home, in clinics , nursing homes and other institutions.

history

The Meyra company was founded in 1936 in Vlotho by Wilhelm Meyer . He initially ran a locksmith's shop and a workshop for ambulances. From 1937 onwards, motorized wheelchairs were made. By the end of the Second World War he already had twenty employees. The production increased by leaps and bounds due to the consequences of the war; In 1948 Wilhelm Meyer developed the motorized Meyra 48 together with Ernst Hoberg ; Later he switched to electric drives for wheelchairs for environmental and health reasons and did not use combustion engines.

In the fifties, the company built the first small cars and equipped the vehicles with polyester bodies. This project was so well received that the Bayer works in Leverkusen presented the “Meyra 200” small car at the Hanover Fair. Shortly afterwards, the first mass-produced plastic car went into production. The "Meyra 200-2" was a crowd puller at all industrial and auto shows. However, it was unable to assert itself on the market, so production was discontinued.

In the following decades, the product range of the Meyra company continued to expand. In 1964 the Offenbach company Petri + Lehr (now based in 63128 Dietzenbach) was bought. In 1972 a subsidiary was founded in the Netherlands. Since the previous headquarters in Vlotho was insufficient for further expansion, a plot of land in Kalldorf was acquired in 1982 in order to build a new administration and production facility there. The Vlotho location was finally given up and the company's headquarters relocated to Kalldorf.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the purchase of the Ortopedia company in 1992, the company and sales areas expanded again significantly. In 1995 subsidiaries were founded in Hungary, Poland and Denmark and the Catanaves company in Spain was taken over. In 2000 the company founder Wilhelm Meyer and his son Wilhelm Meyer junior died. (born 1940) took over the business. At the turn of the millennium, the Meyra company had around 1200 employees and was considered the European market leader in the field of mobility aids. In 2001 the subsidiary CIS ( GUS ) was founded. In 2006 Wilhelm Meyer junior died. and his son Frank Meyer (born 1969) continued the family business from 2006. In 2006, the group of companies was merged to appear on the market together under the name Meyra-Ortopedia.

In March 2013 the company Meyra-Ortopedia filed for bankruptcy. In September 2013, the previous competitor Medort from Lodz, Poland, took over the company and continued it as a subsidiary under the name Meyra GmbH. With this takeover, the history of the Meyra company as a family business also ended. Medort, in turn, is majority owned by the Polish private equity fund Avallon, also based in Lodz. With the purchase of Richter Reha Technik from Thurnau in April 2016, the market share in the e-wheelchair segment was expanded. Avallon will sell the Meyra Group to the US investor "HIG Capital" at the end of 2019 .

Documents on the company's history are archived in the corporate collection of the Deutsches Museum .