Samsara, the provider of the Connected Operations Platform, has released its 2026 State of Connected Operations Asset Theft & Loss Report, finding that equipment theft and loss represents an average $18 million annual operational drain for mid-size organizations that lack asset tracking.
The proprietary study surveyed 1,500 financial executives, most from mid-size operations with between $340 million and $1.4 billion in annual revenue, across construction, logistics, field services, utilities, and similar industries in Canada, the US, Mexico, the United Kingdom, Ireland, France, and Germany.
While heavy machinery theft tends to draw attention, the report found that 72% of operational costs linked to missing equipment come from assets valued under $14,000, including tools, sensors, generators, and specialized parts that operations rely on daily. Equipment theft is a quarterly occurrence for 71% of operations without asset tracking, and 25% of new equipment budgets go toward replacing stolen or lost assets. Nearly all organizations surveyed, 98%, said searching for assets is a daily or weekly occurrence.
The Canadian findings point to a particularly acute problem. At more than a third of Canadian organizations without real-time visibility, employees spend more than 10 hours a week searching for missing equipment, equivalent to more than 520 hours a year, or roughly one full-time employee spending three months annually just looking for gear.
Among Canadian operations, 82% said a missing critical asset caused a significant shutdown or delay in the past 12 months, and 39% have paid for emergency rentals to keep projects moving. Without tracking, the average time to locate a missing asset is 25 days, and 68% of Canadian organizations cannot recover even half of their stolen high-value equipment, a worse recovery rate than the 54% global average.
The Samsara findings align with a long-running concern among Canadian insurers. Northbridge Insurance has estimated the cost of construction theft in Canada at $46 million in 2024, while cargo theft separately costs the Canadian economy an estimated $5 billion annually, according to the Insurance Bureau of Canada, much of it linked to organized crime. Insurers have responded by increasingly linking coverage terms to loss prevention technology, and that shift has accelerated further in trucking and logistics specifically.
Speaking at the Private Motor Truck Council of Canada's 2026 conference, Maria-Christina Sorbo-Mayrand, an associate with Miller Thomson, said insurers are no longer satisfied by the mere presence of telematics or tracking systems and increasingly expect carriers to demonstrate active, documented use of the data those systems generate before extending favorable terms. Some insurers are now requesting multiple years of telematics data during renewal reviews, and companies that can show strong safety performance and consistent risk-management practices are more likely to receive favorable pricing.
That underwriting shift is playing out against a broader crime backdrop. Équité Association has noted that as coordinated enforcement drives down auto theft rates, organized crime groups are shifting capacity toward cargo and commercial vehicle crime, including a 72% year-on-year increase in vehicle finance fraud detected at the ports of Montreal and Halifax in 2025. Auto theft claims values in Canada, meanwhile, reached $724 million in 2025, up from $269 million a decade earlier, even after a 30% year-over-year drop in claim value following coordinated federal and provincial action.
The Samsara report also points to a financial upside from closing the equipment visibility gap. Among Canadian organizations that have implemented asset tracking, 35% report having lowered their insurance premiums as a result, and 66% report a direct reduction in project shutdowns and delays.
John Chaccour, director of technology at Total Safety, said that before deploying Samsara, a single missing piece of equipment could delay a job, idle a crew, and force emergency procurement, all without ever knowing where the asset actually was.
"With real-time asset visibility, we expect a 100% reduction in unreturned assets, 90% reduction in days outstanding, and our teams spending time on safety and customer service instead of searching for tools," he said, adding that the change could add up to millions in recovered operational costs.
