What 1,500 Executives Revealed About Asset Loss

A new industry survey puts a number on something most AV, touring, and manufacturing operations already suspect: gear goes missing constantly, and the true cost runs far beyond the price tag of the item itself.

The 2026 State of Connected Operations report, commissioned by Samsara and conducted independently by Wakefield Research, surveyed 1,500 financial executives across construction, logistics, field services, utilities, and similar equipment-heavy industries in the UK, Ireland, the US, Mexico, France, Germany, and Canada. The findings translate directly to any business that owns, moves, or hires out physical assets.

The headline numbers

• 71% of operations without asset tracking report equipment theft every quarter

• 25% of the annual equipment budget goes toward replacing what's stolen or lost

• £9.7m average annual loss from missing assets once indirect costs (delays, penalties, emergency rentals, wasted labour) are counted, roughly 2.64% of revenue for a mid-size operation

• 72% of that loss comes from assets valued under £7,400

• 25 days average time to locate a missing asset, if it's found at all

• 54% of operations can't recover even half of their stolen high-value equipment

• 77% say a missing critical asset caused a significant shutdown or delay in the last 12 months

• 37% of UK & Ireland operations report higher insurance premiums as a direct result of theft and loss

Small stuff adds up

The most striking finding is where the cost actually comes from. Losses aren't dominated by headline-grabbing heavy machinery theft: they're driven by the small, high-turnover items constantly in motion between sites, vehicles, and crews.

• Tools, sensors, cases, cabling, and specialised parts rarely make it onto formal asset registers

• They're cheap enough to go unmissed for weeks, and easy to lose track of across multiple sites

• The report's conclusion is blunt: financial exposure from small, high-turnover gear can outweigh the market value of the equipment many times over

Once it's gone, it's usually gone for good

Without a tracking solution, recovery is slow and often permanent. Proving ownership to police without a digital record is described in the report as "almost impossible."

• Average recovery time: 25 days

• 54% can't recover even half of stolen high-value equipment

• 98% say searching for assets is now a daily or weekly occurrence

• At more than a quarter of mid-size organisations, staff spend 10+ hours a week searching, the equivalent of one employee doing nothing but searching for three months of the year

What this means outside construction and logistics

The industries surveyed skew toward construction, logistics, and utilities, but the underlying pattern is one AV rental, live events, touring, and manufacturing businesses will recognise immediately: high-value equipment moving constantly between sites, venues, and hands, much of it small enough to walk off unnoticed, and rarely serialised or tracked in a way that would hold up with police or insurers.

• Organisations with asset tracking were 70% less likely to take a seven-figure hit from these operational inefficiencies

• Organisations with asset tracking reported a 76% reduction in average annual costs tied to missing assets

Visibility is the fix

The pattern across the report is consistent: operations without visibility into where their equipment is lose money in ways that are hard to see and even harder to claw back. Operations with real-time tracking recover assets faster, spend less time searching, and see fewer project delays as a result.

That's the gap TAZAAR is built to close.

GeoTag gives every asset a live location and a digital identity; a trail that holds up when it matters. 

AssetID is where that trail lives: one organised register showing what you own, where it's been, and who's responsible for it.

Tag it, then know it. Together, that's how you close the gap between what you think you own and what you can actually account for.

Get in touch to talk through where GeoTag and AssetID could give you visibility over the equipment you can least afford to lose.