Shortly after Apple announced it has sold 3.7 million iPhones by the end of 2007 and the U.S. and European carriers announced that approximately 2.4 million iPhones have been activated last year, one big question emerged: What happened to 1.3 million iPhones? Apparently, there is a logical explanation to all this mistery.

Apple only launched the iPhone in the U.S. and a few European countries, but if we took a tour around the world, we would find it in almost every store, no matter the continent. The iPhone-mania took its “normal” course and hundreds of thousands of iPhones have been already unlocked and adapted to any local carrier in the world.

The estimative figures shouldn’t have come as a surprise, as people were eager for Apple to close deals with their local carriers…which would have taken forever. The New York Times asked its readers to share their opinion on the missing phones case, and the conclusion was the same; the iPhone became available in places you wouldn’t think of at a first glimpse, from Kuwait to Uganda and China.

Highlighting this very idea, Richard Doherty, director at consultant Envisioneering Group, said in a BusinessWeek.com interview last year: “In my travels around the world, two out of three iPhones I’ve seen outside of the U.S. have been unlocked. In China, nine out of ten phones are hacked.” This means Apple’s profits in the iPhone division aren’t as high as expected either.

Despite Apple’s predictions that by the end of 2008 they will reach 10 million iPhone buyers, especially after launches in China and possibly Japan, analyst keep a neutral stance, as the iPhone phenomenon begins to wear off. However, considering the dimensions of the Asian market, the figures don’t seem impossible to reach, but fears that the customers’ interest in the iPhone has dropped begin to rise.