Valentin Gapontsev -- Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Good morning, everyone. As expected, the fourth quarter was challenged. The macro economic climate weakened in our largest markets, reducing demand for our laser products. Despite these challenges, we were able to deliver results in line with the outlook we provided a quarter ago.
More importantly, we have made meaningful strides in key new product areas and undertaking strategic acquisitions that help us capitalize on the long-term growth opportunity for our laser solution. We believe our progress in delivering on new growth opportunities reinforce our industry leadership in fiber laser technology, strengthen our relationships with leading-edge customers, and enables the next generation of product creation. In China, we saw further weakening in demand environment in Q4. Higher tariffs made minimal effect on our production cost.
Thanks to our diverse global manufacturing footprint and vertically integrated manufacturing. However, the U.S.-China trade war heightening and the customary fear and uncertainty. Continued investment spending on industrial and suggests that Chinese manufacturers likely remain committed to the long-term growth plans. In addition, the Chinese government has enacted targeted [Inaudible] to address the market uncertainty and trade war [Inaudible] private enterprises.
This [Inaudible] we could see demand begin [Inaudible]. Near term, we have seen signs of stabilization in our European business. Unfortunately, the drop in the EU eurozone manufacturing PMI from more than 60 a year ago to slightly above 50 today drove a decline in our European business during the second half of 2018. The eurozone is also affected by softer China demand.
There is great uncertainty among the -- our European customers regarding a pickup in demand but overall, trends do not appear to have worsened. With regard with micro economic climate, we remain confident in the [Inaudible] growth of fiber laser technology. Our [Inaudible] and laser tools as well as the continued shift toward high-powered solution in our largest market. We believe there is no company that can deliver high-power laser solution at our quality, scale, cost, and lead time.
While competitors are announcing new products with output power of up to 10 kilowatts. We believe our -- the [Inaudible] technology scale and cost [Inaudible] will enable us to continue to win in this market. Well, it seen strong customer interest for our new CW laser use QCW mode capability that provides good power up to two times average power increase in piercing speed, improving cut quality, and delivering cleaner more controlled drilling of [Inaudible] materials. This unique capability is enabled by IPG's QCV diode [Inaudible] that provides very high peak power for short duty cycle.
The customer are also evaluating our adjustable [Inaudible] lasers, which permit reliable attachment of our beam mode to process a wider range of material [Inaudible] without the use of external optics and without stressing the optical fiber, which we believe can be an issue with competing technologies. When combined with the ongoing improvements, we make each year to the power of electrical efficiency compactness reliability and productivity of our fiber laser portfolio. We expect to continue to derive share gains from traditional process technologies and maintain our competitive lead in the high end of the industrial media market. In 2018, we made excellent progress in new growth areas, helping diversify our business.
Sales of new power, laser systems, communication products and advanced applications increased 36% in 2018 to approximately 15% of total revenue and 20% of total revenue in the fourth quarter. [Inaudible] new laser products, which increased 50% into 2018. These new products include our high-power nanosecond [Inaudible] laser for marking ablation and cleaning, our green power laser for solar cell ablation, ultraviolet lasers for nonmetal marking material ablation, and our family of pico [Inaudible] ultrafast lasers for micro processing application. In addition to sales of new lasers, we sold we sold a record number of beam delivery accessories and complete laser systems, evidence we are becoming a more complete solutions provider within the automotive, aerospace, railway, pipeline, entertainment, medical device, communications industries, and the large screen [Inaudible] systems.
In 2018, systems sales of nearly $60 million increased 47% year over year, driven by growth in macro and micro systems and yearly revenue from our super high lumen digital cinema systems. In December, we closed the acquisition of Genesis Systems Group, a qualified robotic system integrator for more than 300 blue-chip customers, most of which are in U.S., helping to diversify our geographic exposure. The acquisition of Genesis is an important step for IPG's evolution to become a more complete provider of [Inaudible] welding solutions and strategic partner to end customers. We plan to leverage Genesis unique expertise in robotic systems integration to accelerate laser processing within the transportation, aerospace and industrial end market.
Genesis also provides a route to market for IPG's advanced laser welding and laser cleaning solutions. In communications, revenue increased 7% year over year in 2018, driven by double-digit growth in transceiver products. Since the acquisition of Menara Networks in 2016, we have been investing to leverage the proprietary high-speed [Inaudible] transceiver designs and integration capabilities to introduce new pluggable transceiver products into this market. These products address growing bandwidth's demand from data center and telecom customers, and capitalize on the trends toward merchant silicon and coherent, pluggable optics.
The recently announced acquisition of [Inaudible] submarine division will leverage our leading-edge optical amplifiers in GWGM systems capability to address the growing number of undersea cable network deployments by next-gen Internet and data center companies. Also the communications is a small business for us today. We are making a strategic investment that we believe will grow this business to be much more meaningful over time. In advanced applications, we saw increasing acceptance of our single-mode fiber lasers, narrowline amplifiers and high power semiconductor diodes.
Combining these new product opportunities with the progress we are making in medical and dental lasers, instrumentation, semiconductors, electronics, and scientific applications, IPG is unlocking multiple growth drivers that significantly expand our addressable market and diversify our end market exposure. [Inaudible] last decade, our fiber laser technology has captured the majority of the market share for laser-based metal processing. Much of the recent growth has come from China. The share gains achieved in metal processing mean we are now more susceptible to spending cycles on industrial capital equipment.
However, we continue to invest in new fiber laser solutions that address the diverse end markets, including electronics, medical, scientific, defense, entertainment, and communications. In 2018 alone, we spent $123 million in research and development, and $109 million on acquisitions to enhance our solutions portfolio and open up new markets. We expect to grow faster in these new product areas, diversifying our end market exposure and enabling IPG to target a double-digit revenue growth rate. Also, we start the year with a more challenging macroeconomic backdrop.
We remain optimistic about IPG's long-term growth prospects, given our superior technology platform and vertically integrated production model. By leveraging these advantages, we believe growth in our core industrial markets will be driven by higher power solutions and strategic performance, productivity, reliability, and cost of ownership of our products. Our competing solutions -- I remain confident in IPG's ability to grow over the long term and to deliver on our mission to make our fiber laser technology the tool of choice in mass production.
IPG Photonics (IPGP) Q4 2018 Earnings Conference Call Transcript -- The Motley Fool
