Last week I flew into Eastern Europe, or perhaps it was Western Asia to visit Kiev in Ukraine. I was there to speak at a small conference on digital printing linked to a small printing equipment exhibition. At this conference there were three external speakers, myself, an American and an Israeli, and three local Ukraine and Russian speakers.

What I found particularly interesting was the very different position of digital printing in this area compared with the status of digital printing in North American, Western Europe, Japan and Australasia. This was shown up particularly in the opening session at the event where the speaker's subject concerned implementing and benefiting from variable data printing. This was based upon an expectation of an acceptance of digital printing among the audience to get them to think about developing their businesses by adding a variable data element to them. What became apparent very rapidly was that the question was not whether to use variable data printing, but whether digital printing was an approach to be adopted. For this audience the question was still whether to spend money on adding further conventional printing and finishing technology or adding some digital printing capability.

In the "developed" areas of the market it is no longer a question for commercial printers of whether to adopt digital printing, but one of how to best use digital printing to complement offset or other forms of conventional printing. In the areas that many vendors refer to as Developing Markets the situation is quite different. In these markets mass credit card usage is not common.  Large volumes of direct mail are unknown with very little marketing material being sent by post. The potential for variable data in such markets is therefore not substantial at present.

In these markets marketing of digital printing is like it was five years ago in the "developed" markets. The questions are very much in the area of offset transfer with short run printing being the prime application. Obviously the market for photo books and some other web-to-print applications is important as in these markets digital cameras are very popular. Selling variable data however is more complex when the CRM databases largely do not exist to identify people's purchasing habits and interests. It is also likely that these markets will initially have greatest potential for the light color products running up to 60 pages/min rather than the major production level printers. That is not to say such production products will not sell in these markets. In Ukraine HP Indigo has recently installed an Indigo press 5000 and Xerox has installed a Docucolor 8000, but these today are the exception. Relatively low wage rates favor running existing offset presses allowing low costs for printing short runs on conventional offset presses. With the reticence to invest in digital printing there is also a good opportunity for companies like Presstek to sell their latest D.I. printing offset presses.

The approach of selling digital printing in these developing markets is often very different from the developed markets. I don't doubt that the major vendors will get good sales success in these areas, but it will be nothing like the level they achieve in the established markets. The sales approaches are very different. In many cases the marketing and business development collateral is not available in the required languages and this will hinder building the markets. Since a large part of the world falls into this market classification one should not expect the rapid growth of digital printing in the developed markets to be followed in the same way in these other parts of the world.