Irish firms and individuals lose over E440m a year as employees leave smartphones, laptops and other gadgets and property on buses or in pubs, especially at this time of year, according to a new survey. For businesses, the losses come from lost data as much as the value of the gadgets themselves, according to the research, carried out for Mozy in Ireland, the UK, France, Germany, and the USA by OnePoll who quizzed 3,500 people about their experiences of property loss. It is estimated that over E440 million worth of items are lost per year in Ireland alone - a whopping 43pc of those polled in Ireland lose two or more belongings a year and, globally, less than half of lost items are ever recovered. With the average person in Ireland mislaying more than E192 worth of possessions in the past 12 months, this amounts to well over E440 million of lost property in Ireland this year. Most losses occur between 08:00 - 09.00 and from 18:00, highlighting the impact of the morning and evening commutes. Areas where large numbers of people travel for work on public transport, such as capital and large cities, saw regional spikes in loss. Globally, 19pc of all losses happened on public transport, while 28pc in Ireland lose items on public transport, and on their way to work. In Ireland, property loss also spikes between 12:00 - 14:00 weekdays and more importantly 18:00 on Saturdays, with most losses in the month of December. The transition from work to weekend, and Saturday lunches and afternoon Christmas shopping to Saturday night Christmas celebrations, appears to create the perfect conditions for loss with nearly as many items going missing on Fridays and Saturdays as the rest of the week put together. People travelling through Dublin, Cork, Galway and Limerick should be extra cautious since these four cities are prime locations for lost property with more items reported lost or stolen there than any other cities and towns in Ireland. The most commonly-lost item is the smartphone which accounts for 35pc of all item lost by men and 25pc by women globally (39pc male and 27pc female in Ireland). In line with this trend, 70pc of people (45pc in Ireland polled) have lost electronic gadgets, such as smartphones, laptops and MP3 players, which is all the more upsetting because losing these items not only means losing an expensive device but also the data that is held on it. Reinforcing how important backup is, 67pc of Irish respondents said they would be more upset about losing the data on a device than the device itself. So valuable, in fact, is the information on smartphones that, rather than just getting a replacement device, 96pc of people polled in Ireland, who had dropped their phone down a toilet said that they had tried to retrieve it.