New research from Samsung has found businesses lose over two weeks a year due to misfiring tech, equating to 61,509 years lost across all of the UK’s 5.5 million SME businesses.

The tech giant’s poll of 1,000 small and medium-sized enterprises revealed that firms lose nearly £300k a year due to business tech issues, with business owners spending £3,200 each year on repairs and updates.

Without essential maintenance, Samsung’s study estimated that misfiring tech and IT issues could cost small UK businesses a staggering £299,624 a year.

According to the research, UK small businesses would lose £226,808 every year if their work phones were inaccessible, with 74% of SME owners admitting their work phone is integral to their job.

Tech-related frustrations are widespread, as nearly 60% claimed these issues prevent them from working properly, with 42% reporting increased stress as a result. That has led more than half (52%) to say they resort to using their personal devices more than once a week to get the work done.

Among the top stresses caused by tech issues are having to cancel important meetings (66%), missing deadlines (52%) and losing business opportunities (41%).

However, some of these issues might be self-inflicted, as 47% of business owners admitted they’ve tried to cut corners on tech quality, while just 56% typically replace outdated devices every two to five years – with subsequent repairs and updates costing £17.3 billion across the UK’s SME network.

When it comes to productivity, SME owners lamented outdated laptops (27%), incompatible software (27%) and worn-out smartphones (20%) as the biggest culprits for holding them back, and estimated that productivity levels could increase by 40%  with better-functioning technology.

Samsung found that, on average, UK SME owners collectively spend 286 million hours a year contacting IT to resolve hardware and software issues, leading 59% to reveal they often must work overtime as a result.

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Meanwhile, dealing with security concerns to protect business data on work phones (14%), managing the cost of mobile devices (10%) and managing the use of multiple devices by employees (10%) were all revealed to be among the most frustrating parts of running an SME in the UK.

Those figures make it easy to understand why almost two-thirds (64%) of small business owners believe morale within their business would likely improve by the integration of better tech.

That includes the benefits offered by emerging tech. Recent research from ClearSky Logic found that 88% of Scottish SMEs expect AI to boost productivity, with IT (36%), admin (29%), and sales and marketing (21%) being the main areas targeted in order to achieve these sought-after gains.    

The appetite to implement such AI initiatives in UK small businesses continues to grow, with a study from JumpCloud revealing in January that three-quarters (75%) of SMEs are looking to implement AI over the next 12 months, and 39% planning to implement AI in the next six months.