Shortly after Apple and its iPhone partner announced their financial results, the analysts noticed that there could be a little bit of problem. It seems like there are few hundreds of thousands iPhones roaming unaccounted on the market. Let’s see what happened!

Earlier this week, Apple announced that is has sold 3,7 million iPhones until the end of 2007. On the other hand AT&T, the exclusive distributor of iPhone in the US, revealed during its earnings conference call that it has ended the last year with “just at or slightly under 2 million iPhone customers”.

As you can imagine, the analysts immediately noted the discrepancy and has started to search the missing iPhones and some explanations. iPhone is available also in Europe, but there are no precise estimations of how many mobile phones have been sold so far in UK, Germany and France or in other European countries. Orange, France Telecom’s mobile division, confirmed that the French users have bought 70,000 iPhone during the first month of availability, instead of 100,000 forecasted. The iPhone was launched in France on November 29. In UK, Telefonica’s O2 said that on track to sell 200,000 iPhones by early January. There no estimations for the iPhone sales in Germany, except a statement made by an official back in November. He said Apple sold 10,000 iPhone in the fist day.

According to the analysts who are speculating based on those informations, Apple sold in Europe somewhere around 350,000 and 400,000 iPhones. Doing the math it results that 1.3 million of the devices are missing in action.

Toni Sacconaghi, a financial analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein, believes the gap means that the iPhone frenzy is wearing off Apple’s iPhone are piling up in the distribution points.

"This is negative in two ways: (1) it indicates end-user demand for iPhone is lower than many investors may think based on Apple's sales figure; and (2) it points to slower iPhone sales in the current quarter, since much of this inventory is likely to be drawn down," Sacconaghi wrote in a research note. Sacconaghi admits that 20 percent of all iPhones purchased in 2007 were bought with the intention of unlocking, but that still leaves 670,000 iPhones in stores.

However, according to other opinion the situation is quite normal. According to Apple Insider, Gene Munster, a Piper Jaffray analyst, did the math. With 2 million sales confirmed by AT&T and 350,000- 400,000 iPhones that were sold throughout Europe, there are still 1,3 million iPhones missing, but Munster has calculated a bigger number of unlocked iPhones.

In October, Apple said that around 22 percent of US iPhone sales were being purchased with the intent that they'd later be unlocked from AT&T's network. Munster rounded that estimation up to 25%, claiming that since October unlocking has since "become easier."

However, that still leaves 512,000 iPhones, which are unaccounted for, but Munster maintains that they are in the stores and this level is "consistent with Mac and iPod levels over the past 3 years."

Munster estimates 220,000 units are spread between the stores in US and the other 292,000 iPhones are waiting for their European buyers.

Apple officials confirmed at this year MacWorld that they are confident to meet the 10 million mark forecasted for the end of 2008. During this year, Apple will launch its iPhone on the Asian market. Last year in December, there were rumors that Steve Jobs has discussed the launch of iPhone in Japan with DoCoMo President Masao Nakamura. There were also reports that Apple’s officials have negotiating with China Mobile the launch of iPhone in China.