Steyr Arms GmbH

Josef Werndl founded a weapons factory at Steyr in Upper Austria on 16 April 1864, and the town has given its name to the guns ever since. Under Werndl and the engineer Ferdinand Mannlicher the plant grew into one of the largest arms works in Europe, employing more than 15,000 people and turning out 4,000 weapons a day by the First World War. The firearms business was later separated from the vehicle and engineering activities that became Steyr-Daimler-Puch, and today Steyr Arms is a much smaller operation of a little over 200 people across sites in Austria and the United States, with group turnover above 45 million euros in 2023. In April 2024 the Czech investment and industrial group RSBC bought 100 percent of the shares from the previous owner SMH Holding. The company sells into three quite different markets from one factory, and the split matters when reading the catalogue.

The military and law enforcement line is built around the AUG, the bullpup that entered Austrian service in 1977 as the StG 77 and was sold abroad as the Armee Universal Gewehr. It has been adopted by Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Luxembourg, Malaysia and others, and licence production has run at Thales Australia as the F88 and EF88 Austeyr, at SME Ordnance in Malaysia and at Dasan Machineries in South Korea. Current government models are the AUG A1 and AUG A3, the DMR 762 designated marksman rifle, the SSG 08, SSG M1 and SSG M1 A2 bolt-action sniper rifles, the HS .50 M1 anti-materiel rifle and the GL 40 grenade launcher. The A2 MF service pistol, a polymer-framed 9 mm with an unusually low bore axis, is sold to police and to civilians alike. Historic military designs from the same lines include the SSG 69, the IWS 2000 and the MPi 69 and TMP submachine guns.

Hunting and sporting products are the larger part of the unit count. The bolt-action range covers the Scout II, the Monobloc, the CL II, the Gams, the SM12, the THB, the Pro Varmint and the Zephyr II rimfire, plus a Steyr Custom shop and the newer RMS Wild and MS Wild lines. Sporting rifles put military actions into civilian hands as the semi-automatic AUG SA and the target versions of the SSG, and several models are offered in straight-pull SX form for hunters who want a faster cycle without a gas system. Steyr also sells its own suppressors under the Breezer name, including the over-barrel OSD II and the UMS built for the AUG. Knives, outdoor gear, apparel and books fill out a fan shop that trades on a brand older than most countries in Europe. The commercial side pays the overhead between government orders, which for a firm of this size arrive in lumps rather than in a steady stream, and the hunting customer gets the same barrel-making and stock engineering that goes into the sniper rifles. None of this is a large business by defence standards. It is a design house with a very long memory and a factory attached to it.