BEIJING -- China will step up the protection of intellectual property rights (IPR), making it play a significant role as a cornerstone of economic development, innovation and international trade, a senior official with China's National Intellectual Property Administration (NIPA) said Wednesday.

China is speeding up its transformation from industrialization to informatization, said Shen Changyu, head of NIPA, at the 2019 High-level Forum on China IP Protection.

He said invisible assets such as patents, trademarks, copyrights, trade secrets and software are playing an increasingly important role during the transformation, and the importance of IPR protection was becoming increasingly prominent.

In order to enhance IPR protection, China will improve intellectual property laws and regulations, he said.

Shen said China would make efforts to shorten the average time of trademark review to less than five months and cut the time of high-value patents review by more than 15 percent.

According to Shen, by the end of 2018 there were 1.62 million invention patents on the Chinese mainland, and 19.564 million effective trademarks registered.

The 2019 forum consists of one main forum and six thematic forums covering topics such as artificial intelligence, IPR protection and sports industry.