HTC has been off to a pretty great start here in 2012 with their HTC One line of smartphones. With good international sales, and stateside with the HTC One X, and One S mainly. Despite having a few awesome smartphones their Q2 report wasn’t that great, and now we are hearing poor sales is making them completely pull out of the South Korea market that is dominated by Samsung.

That isn’t all either. We heard a similar report recently that they are also pulling out of Brazil, and don’t even get me started on Beats Audio. Too late. HTC recently announced that they’ve sold back 25% of the 51% they bought of Beats Audio. They are no longer the majority stakeholder and won’t be releasing “Beats Audio” branded phones in the future. They have some great ideas and awesome phones, but not everything works out as intended.

According to the Korean Times HTC noted that this will be “a long term process and not an immediate one as we want to cause the least disturbance for our customers here and continue after-sales services.” HTC also used this statement to mention this move will help “streamline operations” in competing markets that have shown great promise. Between Samsung and LG the Korean market has been a tough one, and the iPhone has made a decent dent their too.

Between low sales, tons of patent lawsuits (and product delays) it’s safe to say things aren’t going quite as well as planned for the folks over at HTC. It really is a shame as they have some of the best hardware around and I’m a huge fan of their smartphones. I’ll never forget my HTC Nexus One. Hopefully HTC will continue with the less is more goal and focus on awesome products instead of so many different phone options. We’d hate to see a dominant player and awesome manufacture bow out completely, but that is still far from ever happening.

[via SlashGear]