Kimoha Entrepreneurs said the Xeikon 3300 with an inline DCoat 330 finishing unit would produce "much faster turnaround times" for the short-run jobs common in the United Arab Emirates.

Kimoha executive director Wolfram Gruening told the drupa report daily the 3300 would also help the company to win new short-run work.

He said Kimoha would have to retrain its sales force to properly exploit these new opportunities in what he said was an underdeveloped market.

The machine will be used for run lengths of less than 2,000 metres, while the company’s flexo presses will handle longer jobs, according to Gruening.

He described Kimoha as "the pacemaker with technology in the Middle East", which meant it was a question of when, not if, it would go digital.

Xeikon’s director of segment marketing and business development, Filip Weymans, said the Belgian manufacturer had been selling about two 3300s a day at drupa to customers from Latin America, western Europe, Japan and the Middle East.

The Kimoha deal was "the result of the increased attention Xeikon has put into the Middle East", he said.

The 3300 has about 30% of the digital label printer market, according to Weymans.

Kimoha managing director Vinesh Bhimani said his 230-staff firm was expanding and included multinationals such as Singapore Airlines, Nestlé and Johnson & Johnson as clients. He said Kimoha had been named Dubai’s third-best innovator out of 73,000 small to medium-sized enterprises.