Antonio Perez is chief executive of Kodak. At the helm of the company for the past seven years, he has steered it through what was arguably the most dramatic period of evolution in the firm's 125-year history.

What are your early thoughts on the show?

I asked my team about how the show was going and, of course, it's a little smaller than four years ago and I'm sure the volcano issue might impact on visitor numbers. I won't share the precise figures but sales numbers are already well above what we expected, so, so far so good.

Obviously, at the last few shows you only had technology demonstrations rather than real products on the stand. Why did you decide to bring equipment to Ipex?

This time we had to show Prosper printing full-colour, double-sided at 650ft/min, which is a fundamental product for us. In fact, we're introducing six new products: Trillian and Flexcel plates, Colorflow, Nexpress SE platform and the Stream S10 inkjet heads. I've already mentioned that we have hundreds of customers waiting for Prosper, unfortunately we won't be able to build that many this year. We'll be in the 10s or 20s.

Is that a concern? HP is already racking up several installations of its T300 high-speed inkjet press.

It's a comparable solution, that's true. It's an alternative and if people can't wait for the best then, of course, some will go for something else. I think there is no technology like Stream as far as productivity, speed and versatility of substrates. You need to combine all of those things and nothing gets even close to Stream or Prosper. The speed and substrate limitations of the other machines are hugely important issues for printers; I think it is up to us to move faster and build as many as we can. We won't go faster than we should. The idea of this technology is to revolutionise the industry and you can't rush that, you have to do it well.

When you say revolutionise the industry, do you mean that you see it taking over from offset?

I see the industry as being made up of firstly transactional printers that are based in very low cost, high-volume, low quality and commercial printers that have the ‘artistic' machines that produce very high quality, lower volumes - the differentiator is technology.

You see offset that will give you photo quality, 4,000 pages a minute on any substrate you want and at less than a cent per page, but it doesn't have variable-data capabilities. Then you have electrophotography that gives you photo quality but is only 100 pages a minute, costs five or six cents a page and can use only limited substrates, but it does have variabledata capabilities. We need the best of both worlds. We need what offset offers, plus variable data printing. What's going to happen now we have that? I can't predict the future, but the structure of the industry will change.

The cost structure of the high volume printers will be very valuable if they go to very high quality; the colour management expertise of other printers will be very valuable if they could only move to high volumes. I can't tell you what is going to happen. But I can tell you that something is going to happen that will change this industry and I think that we have one of those tools, together with controller technology and workflow technology, because without those none of this is going to happen. That's why we bought Creo, so that we could integrate its workflow and controller technology with our colourmanagement solutions to try to create as best we can a universal workflow environment. Our goal is to change the printing industry - I know it sounds very ambitious, but we are ambitious.

So, if we accept that the plate market is in decline...

The plate market is not in decline.

But it will be in the future, surely? If, as you say, more print moves across to digital then by default won't there be less demand for plates?

Let me qualify that. This is like when I'm told we're moving towards a paperless world - people have been saying that for 30 years. Some 76 trillion pages of print are produced across the world - 90% is printed offset. Digital presses produce, say, 5% or 6% - over the next 10 years that might increase by another 10%. That would be wonderful. So don't predict the death of digital plates, please. And we haven't seen China or India move to digital plates yet, and if the US and Europe make up only 12% of the world's population then we're nothing. The majority of the world has yet to move to CTP and already people are hailing the death of them. Digital plates have a long and healthy life ahead.

Partnerships seem to be one of the themes of the show. How important are they to Kodak?

Prosper and Stream are so powerful that there's no way that we will be able to work in all the applications and configurations alone, that's not our intent. We're going to concentrate on the ones where we can offer something different and for the rest we will look at partnerships. We already have a number in place, but we'll be looking for more. For example, in packaging, there are some possible applications there and sheetfed, too - the engine is perfect for both and we're are looking for partners.

Looking at the company today, if you compare it to the ‘glory days' of 14-15 years ago the share price was around the $80 mark, whereas now it's nearer $6...

We're building a new company, I'm not looking at the history books. I understand that is true, and you have to write about these things, but we're looking to build this company and in 2011/2012 it will be the business we want it to be. We're on the right path. This is a marathon and I'm not going to be celebrating halfway through, that doesn't make much sense.

I know that I'm being judged along the way, and that's fine, but our job is to get to the finish line first and we have a strategy that will get us there.

The question was more about your asset value really...

Oh, big time. The sum of the parts is easily $8bn dollars, the market capitilsation is less than $2bn. Can I explain this? I could try.

...but do you think that means that Kodak will still be an independent company in five or 10 years' time because consolidation is as needed among the manufacturers as it is by your customers.

What is the word that is stronger than absolutely? Definitely? Absolutely definitely.