Samsara’s 2026 asset theft and loss report estimates that mid-size organisations without asset tracking face an average £9.7 million annual operational cost, with most of the burden linked to lower-value equipment rather than heavy machinery.
In construction, utilities, logistics and field service operations, the asset that stops a job is not always the excavator or the vehicle. It can be a generator, a sensor, a specialist tool or a part that is inexpensive enough to escape rigorous tracking, but critical enough to idle a crew when it disappears.
That is the operational blind spot highlighted in new research released by Samsara, which commissioned Wakefield Research to survey 1,500 financial executives across the United States, Mexico, the United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Germany and Canada. The study focuses largely on mid-size operations with annual revenue between £180 million and less than £740 million, and examines the financial effect of equipment theft and loss where asset tracking is not in place.
The headline figure is substantial: operations without asset tracking lose an average of £9.7 million a year when direct replacement costs and indirect operational impacts are combined. Samsara’s report also says 71% of such operations experience equipment theft every quarter, while 25% of new equipment budgets are spent replacing stolen or lost assets.
Why the small-asset finding matters
The most useful part of the study is not simply that theft is costly. It is the distribution of those costs. According to the report, 72% of the annual operational impact comes from missing assets valued under £7,400, including tools, sensors, generators and specialised parts.
That makes this announcement distinct from typical asset-tracking market updates, which often focus on high-value machinery, fleet equipment or recoverable capital assets. Samsara is pointing to a different economic case: the cumulative disruption caused by assets that may be too low in value to justify traditional management processes individually, but collectively account for the majority of the loss.
For IoT professionals, this shifts the discussion from “Can we recover expensive equipment?” to “Which assets are operationally critical enough to justify persistent visibility?” If 72% of the cost sits below the heavy-machinery threshold, then tracking only vehicles, trailers and large plant would still leave a large part of the problem unresolved. The practical implication is that device cost, attachment method, battery life, workflow integration and exception reporting become as important as location accuracy itself.
The report also underlines why asset loss is not just a procurement issue. Samsara found that 98% of organisations say searching for assets happens daily or weekly. At more than a quarter of organisations without real-time visibility, employees spend more than 10 hours per week looking for missing equipment. The average time to locate a missing asset is 25 days, and 77% of respondents globally said a missing critical asset caused a significant shutdown or delay in the previous 12 months. In the UK and Ireland, that figure was 71%.
Those figures matter because they describe a failure mode familiar to industrial IoT deployments: the cost is often created in the gap between the physical asset and the digital workflow. A missing tool or component may trigger manual searches, emergency rentals, delayed jobs, idle labour and contract penalties. Tracking technology alone does not remove all of those costs, but without an accurate asset state, the rest of the process is forced to operate on assumptions.
Samsara connects the research to its own asset visibility portfolio, including the Samsara Asset Gateway, Asset Tag and Asset Tag XS. The company describes these as tracking devices designed for tough conditions and supported by its connected operations platform. The report does not provide technical specifications for the devices, so the significance here is less about a new hardware claim and more about the operational category Samsara is targeting: distributed, mixed-value equipment across job sites, depots and mobile workforces.
For OEMs and equipment suppliers, the findings reinforce the case for making trackability easier to support across smaller asset classes, not just premium machines. For connectivity providers, they point to continued demand for scalable, low-friction IoT connectivity that can handle large numbers of modest-value endpoints. System integrators may see the harder task in linking location data with maintenance, dispatch, inventory and job management systems, where the indirect savings are likely to be captured.
Enterprises and industrial operators should read the report with some caution, since it was commissioned by a vendor with a commercial interest in asset tracking. The methodology is nevertheless clearly stated: respondents were financial executives, not necessarily Samsara customers, and results were aggregated across the seven surveyed countries. For decision makers, the useful takeaway is not a universal cost benchmark, but a diagnostic question: are asset controls focused only on what is expensive to buy, or also on what is expensive to lose during operations?
In the UK and Ireland, the report adds another consequence, with 37% of organisations saying asset theft and loss has led to higher insurance premiums. That reinforces the broader point. Asset visibility is increasingly part of operational resilience, not merely a recovery tool after theft has occurred.
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