Even for an 11 year-old, the euro has looked impetuous. Less than a year after it began trading in January 1999, it lost one quarter of its value versus the dollar. Over the following decade, it gained 60%. In September, I urged readers, "Don't Count Out the U.S. Dollar." Based on a comparison of purchasing power in the U.S. and Europe, at the time the euro looked overpriced. Since then, it has lost 16%.

The latest decline will surely affect trade, because European goods have become cheaper relative to American ones. Germany's exports surged in March at their fastest rate in 18 years. Investors are watching U.S. manufacturers closely for signs that overseas customers are reducing orders. S&P 500 companies draw nearly 30% of their sales from Europe, according to Standard & Poor's.

Nimble investors might wish to respond to the recent currency swing by, say, selling their shares in a U.S. tractor maker and scooping up ones in a German engineering firm, Dutch food giant or French drug maker. However, for buy-and-hold investors, it might be easier to simply choose among companies whose sales and costs are spread evenly among the world's regions and currencies, so that a swoon in one market is likely to be offset by a pick-up in another. Screening companies according to their geographic sales diversification isn't easy because each company has its own way of dividing the globe, and stock screening software depends greatly on uniformity among data. To select the companies below, I started with a list of S&P 500 members that pay decent dividends and have reported sales growth of late, and then skimmed the annual reports of promising candidates for ones whose customers seem spread relatively evenly throughout the world. (For each, I've listed sales by geography as the company reports it.)

Analog Devices

United States 20%; rest of North/South America 5%; Europe 25%; Japan 17%; China 19%; rest of Asia 14%

Most consumers know "analog" as an old-fashioned means of playing recorded music -- running a needle through a record groove, for example. However, in the world of electronic circuits, the term refers to those that process real-world phenomena. For example, the digital controls of a car's climate control system are of little use without an analog sensor to read the temperature. Analog Devices sells components for cars, cellphones, factory equipment and much else, and reported a 41% jump in sales in its most recent quarter. Demand from industrial customers was especially strong. Shares sell for 14 times forecast earnings for the company's fiscal year ending Oct. 31. A recent dividend increase puts the stock's yield at 2.8%.

Coca-Cola

Eurasia & Africa 6.4%; Europe 13.9%; Latin America 12%; North America 26.4%; Pacific 14.6%; bottling investments 26.4%; corporate 0.4%

Coca-Cola did business last year using 71 currencies besides the U.S. dollar. Nearly three quarters of the company s operating revenues come from outside the U.S. Two trends have dominated the soft drink business in recent years: rapid sales growth in emerging markets and a shift in consumer preference in developed markets from sugary sodas to healthier still beverages like tea and bottled water. Coca-Cola plans to invest heavily to expand its distribution in China over the next three years and recently bought the North American operations of Coca-Cola Enterprises, a key bottling partner. That acquisition is meant to give the company more flexibility in introducing new beverages, according to Philip Gorham of Morningstar Equity Research. Over the past year, Coca-Cola turned 28 cents of each sales dollar into operating profit, about a dime more than rival Pepsi. Shares of Coca-Cola sell for 15.4 times earnings and carry a 3.3% dividend yield.

3M

United States 36.8%; Asia Pacific 26.5%; Europe, Middle East & Africa 25.8%; Latin America & Canada 10.9%

Conglomerate 3M, which has a hand in touch screens, dental braces and dog chews, appears to have reached "critical reinvestment velocity," Nicholas Heymann of Birmingham, Ala. investment bank Sterne Agee wrote in a Tuesday note to clients. That's a point where it can "generate so much cash that it can reinvest at a rising rate to enhance future growth at an accelerating rate." One sign that reinvested cash will be put to good use: 3M's return on equity, a measure of how much profit it squeezes from the resources it uses, recently topped 30%. That's nearly as high as the ROEs of envied technology firms like Apple and Google. The company collects nearly one-third of its sales from emerging markets but also has relatively low market shares in them, which Heymann calls evidence of the company's growth potential. Shares of 3M sell for 18 times earnings and yield 2.5%.