organized on the occasion of Mauna Kea Technologies, first half, 2023 sales. I will now hand over to Sacha and Côme to present the figures on the business updates of the company. Sacha, Côme, the floor is yours.
Thank you, Thomas. Hello, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today. We're live from Paris, happy to report on our Q1, Q2, and H1 business update for the year 2023. I'm even happier to be here with Côme, who joined us as our new CFO about 6 weeks ago. This is Côme's first webinar with me, and hopefully the first of many. Very happy to welcome Côme to the team. As a reminder, we are here to change lives by providing a unique opportunity for physicians and surgeons to see cells in real time, thanks to our proprietary platform, Cellvizio.
Our mission is to provide our partners and providers with this cutting-edge technology that can transform interventional cancer care, and we're very excited to make great progress on this mission. The future of our Cellvizio platform and business is built on very strong pillars, and just want to remind you of what they are today. First of all, Cellvizio is a unique and differentiated imaging platform. It's a proprietary platform that produces real-time, in vivo cellular images in almost any setting of interventional oncology today. It is used to identify and target abnormal cells and improve patient outcomes by doing so.
The second pillar is that Cellvizio is built on a very strong intellectual property portfolio, which consists of more than 250 issued patents, but also more than 20 FDA clearances as well in Europe, in China, but also Category I CPT codes in the U.S. for upper GI endoscopy, so the applications in the esophagus and other organs around that. The third pillar is our extensive knowledge of medical procedures. Physicians have performed more than tens of thousands of procedures on patients in more than 20 countries with Cellvizio, and have created a phenomenal repository of clinical papers using Cellvizio for various therapeutic areas. If you went on PubMed and looked for these papers, you would find more than 1,000 of these, including very high-profile, recent publications.
We have a very strong pipeline of potential strategic partnerships. We've announced this new strategy about 18 months ago to enhance our market penetration, thanks to strategic partners. We have concretized this strategy last year with a very important partnership in China with Tasly Pharmaceutical, with whom we have formed a joint venture, and we'll talk about this later. We also have long-standing collaborations with industry leaders, notably Johnson & Johnson, who is also an important shareholder of ours. We work with the Lung Cancer Initiative on various initiatives to improve patient care in the field of interventional pulmonology. We also have a long-standing collaboration with Telix Pharmaceuticals, an Australian biopharma company with a remarkable path to success.
We work with Telix in the field of urologic oncology and notably, the procedures of prostatectomy and nephrectomy. These the markets addressed by Cellvizio in the therapeutic areas I just mentioned, are very significant. More than $2, 3 billion market potential. Notably, in our core commercial activity, which is in the field of Barrett's esophagus and stomach cancer, this is a multi-billion dollar opportunity that we're addressing. As you can see, there are many others that are currently being developed on this graphic. We have created in the past 18 months, a very significant pipeline of strategic partnerships with more than 10 indications that we're working on.
As you can see on this slide, obviously, several of them are in the field of gastroenterology, but also, as I mentioned, in the field of interventional pulmonology, where we believe Cellvizio can play a key role in the fight against lung cancer, in providing a key complement to existing endoluminal robotics platforms or other navigation platforms, in this field. Also in the field of urology, neurosurgery, and outside of cancer, in the field of inflammatory bowel disease and also irritable bowel syndrome, where we are making great progress on the clinical side. We are continuously improving our platform. This is the third generation Cellvizio platform that we have launched about 18, 20 months ago.
We are continuously improving it by providing new features, new products, by developing the ecosystem in which Cellvizio evolves. Notably, we're working on 4 areas of development. The first one is molecular cancer imaging, so this is typically what we're doing with Telix. Also in the field of robotic-assisted imaging, this is typically what we're doing with the Monarch platform with Johnson & Johnson. We're also working hard on artificial intelligence features, and we'll talk more about this. Also in the creation of multimodal data sets, where the integration of Cellvizio imaging can play a key role for pharmaceutical development. More on this later. To summarize the main achievements of the company in the first half of 2023, first of all, it's all about the team.
We have strengthened the leadership team very significantly. First of all, I appointed a Chief Operating Officer and Deputy CEO very late in 2022. Nathalie Lecoq joined us around Christmas 2022 and has been a key performer and addition to the team since then, and of course, more recently, Côme, who joined us as our new Chief Financial Officer about 6 weeks ago and who will speak in just a couple of minutes. In terms of our activity, we've had excellent business performance this half year. As you will see, strong acceleration of our sales growth, notably in the US, despite a sharp reduction in our commercial footprint, as announced already last year.
In terms of our partnership pipeline, as I said, we have, first of all, launched our joint venture with Tasly in China and have recruited a number of people, the activity there is intense. We have multiplied the discussions with other potential partners in several therapeutic areas. Again, very importantly, our product is constantly being enhanced by a very agile framework that we have established, thanks to our new CTO, in the past couple of years. We have launched new features, we're preparing the launch of new features, and we're also preparing, notably, our submission for first AI features with the FDA in the coming months. With that, I will turn to Côme to give you a description of our Q2 and H1 numbers.
Well, thank you, Sacha. Well, just let me start saying that I'm very excited to be here today and to be part of, well, of this first webinar with Mauna Kea, and to share as well, these excellent figures with you. Indeed, as Sacha has just pointed out, we have maintained and even strengthened the very good momentum we have since the beginning of the year. As you know, as a reminder, our sales are based on two pillars that are the foundation of our current strategy, which is direct sales from our sales force, notably in the U.S. and in Europe, and also the licensing revenues coming from our partnerships.
You see that in the second quarter of 2023, total revenues rose by 77% year on year to EUR 2.7 million. This was driven by the very sharp increase we saw in sales in the US, which doubled compared to the second quarter of last year, as well that, as well, as by the licensing revenues that we received from the JV, we jointly own with Tasly Pharmaceutical in China. In this respect, you see this on the graph. We recognized nearly half a million EUR in revenues in this second quarter, which corresponds to the recognition over time of the upfront payment received on the signature of the partnerships last year.
You see that in the first half of this year, total revenue more than doubled year-on-year, which rising by precisely 102%, to EUR 6.8 million. You see that sales for the period amounted to EUR 3.5 million, and licensing revenues from the JV in China amounts to EUR 3.3 million this semester. If we go to the sales by segment in the first quarter, we exclude the license revenues, you can see that we recorded a positive growth in all the segments. This is very positive, and the strongest growth was in sales of Cellvizio systems.
Since you see that we have almost double the revenues compared to last year. Sales came to EUR 699 thousand, at 93%, driven by both the U.S. and Europe, with 4 systems sold over the period, despite the negative impact of the transfer of Chinese business to our JV. The second segment is the consumables, which is made up of both probe cells and revenues from our PPU business in the U.S., where we recorded a 40% increase to almost 1.1 million EUR this quarter. Those numbers are very encouraging.
This is a very encouraging dynamic, which because it reflects the growing use of our system, which is by nature, more stable and more recurrent, than the cell of system, which are more erratic, by nature. We have particularly benefited from this PPU business in the U.S., which grew by 50% year-on-year and has been growing steadily for several quarters now. Even our centers are experiencing difficulties with fluorescein supplies, just as we mentioned, last quarter. This momentum, which is also very positive, is that this momentum can be seen both on our existing accounts but also on the new accounts, and we have added five new accounts, during this half year.
Finally, you see that Cellvizio services, in amounted to EUR 381,000, at 5% overall. They benefited in particular from the financial contribution of Johnson & Johnson, to whom, we provide equipment for clinical studies. Now, if we go to the sales by geography, this quarter, it's not a surprise to you, that the growth is driven by the U.S. You see that now the U.S. accounts for more than 3 times sales in the rest of the world, given the situation in China, where we transfer the business to the JV.
Sales in the U.S. amounted to EUR 1.7 million over the quarter, which is twice the sales we reported last year, and they were driven by all the mentioned segments, including system, consumable, and services. In Europe, sales reached EUR 481,000, up 34% year-on-year, thanks to system sales, including the installation of the Cellvizio at Cork University in Ireland, that we reported earlier this quarter. Lastly, sales in the Asia Pacific region were unsurprisingly down versus last year. Since the business, as I mentioned, the business in China is now managed directly by our JV with Tasly. In this respect, we no longer record sales, but we record licensing revenues.
In the near future, what is positive for the growth of the company is that we will also be recording system sales directly to the JV, and we will also be recording our shares of the profits from the JV in our accounts. Let Sacha conclude on the group priorities.
Thank you very much, Côme. you know, our priorities are quite clear, and they've been as such for now several quarters. First of all, we are focused on driving business momentum. Obviously, we want to intensify the adoption of our next generation Cellvizio platform in multiple therapeutic areas, and by doing so, increasing our monthly revenue. The second priority is to increase or continue to increase our operational performance, grow our revenue, but also optimize our cost structure, which has already gone down significantly in the past 18 months. by doing so, increasing our cash runway, and we're working on that as well. The third priority is to ensure our technological excellence, as we are probably will probably be facing some competition, especially in China.
We are, as I said, developing new features twice a year, and we're now integrating artificial intelligence to give us an even greater edge. We're working on the submission, as I said, to the FDA. Fourth, very importantly, we are, you know, we want to build a very significant value through strategic partnerships. We are working hard to make our JV in China a very efficient and dynamic company. We've hired a number of people. I'll be there in a couple of weeks to work with the team there. You know, we are very confident we'll be signing new partnerships in the quarters to come, thanks to a very significant pipeline of these potential partnerships that we've built over the past 9 months.
With that, I want to thank you all for your attention. I want to congratulate the team for the hard work, this past quarter, which is paying off. We will be talking to you, of course, for our H1 financials, late September. With that, if there are any questions, we'll be happy to take them and answer.
Thank you, Sacha. Thank you, Côme. If you would like to ask a question to Mauna Kea Technologies management, you can do so by typing your question at the bottom of your screen. It seems that the presentation was quite clear.
I think the presentation, hopefully, and the results are quite clear as well. Thank you all for your presence and attention, and, we look forward to talking to you again very soon.
Thank you. Bye-bye. Thank you. Bye-bye.
Bye.