The paper reports on a study of the comparative stability of foreign owned manufacturing firms in Wales, using as a framework the Welsh Register of Manufacturing Employment which records details of regional manufacturing entry and exits since 1966. The paper is set in the context of competing claims on the more transformative effects of inward investment with some stressing that notions of a ‘new regionalism’ in Wales have been unjustly founded on assumptions about the transforming effects of foreign investment. There is also a problem of a paucity of research showing how foreign investment had been involved in evolutionary processes of regional economic change. The paper shows that a more complete appreciation of the role of inward investment needs to consider not only its role in job creation but also the relative stability of the investment and jobs attracted. The paper reveals how analysis of plant birth and deaths also links through to perspectives offered by evolutionary economic geography, and how patterns of entry and exit might work to influence the economic trajectories of a disadvantaged region such as Wales.