SHENZHEN-BASED Tencent, China’s Internet giant, told the Southern Metropolis Daily on Wednesday that the company has disbanded its Weibo team and integrated it into Tencent News.

    Users can still use Tencent Weibo, but the company won’t develop new functions for it, Tencent said.

    The dismissal of the microblog team didn’t affect the company’s stock prices.

    Initiated in April 2010, Tencent Weibo was created as a response to its largest competitor, Sina Weibo.

    Tencent launched WeChat in 2011, another form of social media that had nearly 400 million active users by the end of March.

    Sina Weibo had 500 million users and it was listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange by that time. The increasing popularity of WeChat and Sina Weibo threatens Tencent Weibo.

    The company developed a video application last September that allows users to post and share short videos, making it another competitor to Weibo.

    Tencent said the integration of Weibo into Tencent News is one of the company’s revolutionary steps to strengthen its overall social information services.

    It added that it will keep expanding the investment of the video app.

    Many industry insiders said the dismissal of the Tencent Weibo team shouldn’t be seen as a failure of the product. Instead, it is an optimization of Tencent’s social media products, they said.

    (Zhang Yang,Yang Xueqing)