BlackBerry said on Wednesday that it will stop internal development of smartphones, relying on partners for any future hardware efforts.

The move comes as the company has struggled to turn around its phone business.

'The company plans to end all internal hardware development and will outsource that function to partners,' CEO John Chen said in a statement.

'This allows us to reduce capital requirements and enhance return on invested capital,' it said.

BlackBerry has been setting the stage for such a move for a while now. It has already released one phone, the DTEK50, that was essentially a rebadged Alcatel phone and has started offering up pieces of its phone software for use on other Android devices.

Chen had said BlackBerry would exit the phone business if it could not make it profitable.

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