This week, currency risk management software vendor FiREapps released its quarterly report on the impact of foreign exchange (FX) on corporate earnings. The report surveyed Q4/2016 earnings reports from 1,200 large, publicly traded multinationals based in North America and Europe.

Of the 1,200 companies, 296 reported that currency shifts had a negative impact on their earnings in the fourth quarter. Among companies that quantified this effect, the total impact was a reduction in earnings of $10.47 billion. This is less than a third the size of the total currency impact FiREapps quantified a year earlier: $36.85 billion in Q4/2015. The FiREapps report attributes this difference “not necessarily to lower currency volatility, but to the number of companies that appear to have not reported material impacts.” In Q4/2015, 409 companies reported negative currency impacts.

For the 29 percent of North American companies that reported a negative currency impact in Q4/2016, the average effect on earnings per share was $0.04 per share. This is down significantly from Q3/2015 ($0.12/share) and Q4/2015 ($0.07/share), but FiREapps sees best practice as keeping the target currency impact to just $0.01 per share.