India may have the world's fastest growing wireless market, but Apple (AAPL) didn't set its hopes particularly high when it launched the iPhone 3G there in August. It reportedly shipped only 50,000 units to its partners on the subcontinent, with plans to double that number by the end of the year.

If so, those partners may have a lot of unsold iPhones on their hands come January. According to a long postmortem published this week in the Delhi-based newspaper Mint, Apple has sold only 11,000 iPhones in India, a country of 1.14 billion that buys 8 to 10 million cellphones a month.

"IPhone’s launch in India has been dubbed the biggest failure of a top-notch brand from a well regarded company in recent times," wrote Priyanka Mehra and Shauvik Ghosh in a piece that underscores the difficulty of adapting Apple's U.S.-based smartphone strategy to markets around the world.

Price, according to the authors, is only part of the problem. Although most Indians buy cheap cellphones on a pre-paid basis, there were plenty of potential customers who could afford the 31,000 rupees ($716 at the time) that Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Essar were charging for the 8GB iPhone. According to Mint, Nokia (NOK), Samsung and RIM (RIMM) are all doing good business in India selling smartphones that cost even more.

But Steve Jobs had announced before the launch that Apple would be priced at $199 globally — less than 10,000 rupees — a promise he couldn't deliver on in India because local cellphone companies don't subsidize cellphones with lock-in clauses the way carriers routinely do in the United States and Europe.

“This built a false hope in the minds of those consumers who wanted to buy it and turned away those who could have actually bought it,” Prathap Suthan, creative director of advertising agency Cheil Communications India, told Mint.

Moreover, he says, Bharti and Vodafone, lacking experience in the complex Indian retail environment, dropped the ball in terms of marketing and distribution. By selling iPhones exclusively at their own outlets, they've antagonized the big retail chains that dominate the market in India.

“A brand like Apple need not be told that an iconic product needs iconic advertising, a solid marketing push,” says Suthan, “The company failed to strike a connect with Indian consumers."

For more of Mehra and Ghosh's analysis, see livemint.com here.

[Thanks to Chris Foresman at Ars Technica's Infinite Loop for the link.]

The week opens with fresh reports of iPhone agreements with overseas carriers, as Apple (AAPL) continues its push to roll the Web-browsing cellphone out beyond the United States and Europe.

The Wall St. Journal, BBC and other sources reported on Monday that Apple and SingTel have signed deals to bring the iPhone to four countries in the Asia-Pacific region. SingTel, with 124 million mobile subscribers, is said to be the largest Asian provider outside the People's Republic of China. The deals involve SingTel and three of its subsidiaries:

• SingTel will bring the iPhone to its 2.3 million subscribers in Singapore
• Bharti Airtel will offer it to its 64 million customers in India
• Globe Telecom will offer it to 21 million subscribers in the Philippines
• Optus will offer it to its 7 million customers in Australia.

Australia and India were among the countries that Vodaphone (VOD) said last week that it was covering (see here) — further evidence that Apple is signing contracts that don't offer exclusivity.

Below: an update of CdnPhoto's map of the iPhone world, redrawn to include the latest developments.

Hats off to Silicon Alley Insider for their continued coverage of the overseas iPhone market.

Last week, Henry Blodget plucked a pseudonymous post from a New York Times comment stream and re-published what may be the smartest analysis to date of what's driving the extraordinary demand for iPhones overseas, especially in emerging markets (see "Tantrum" here).

Today, Dan Frommer treats us to an informal survey of the going rate for those iPhones once they are unlocked and put up for sale. The results, grabbed from Craigslist or their local equivalents (Molotok, anyone?), are posted at right. For comparison, he notes, Apple (AAPL) sells the 8 GB iPhone for $399 in the U.S. and the 16 GB model for $499. (link)

Not much news was committed by Apple (AAPL) at its annual shareholders' meeting Tuesday in Cupertino — although the shareholders did manage to make headlines by passing a referendum (which the company opposed) that gives them a nonbinding say on executive compensation. "I'm hoping that the 'say on pay' proposal will help me with my $1 a year," Jobs quipped after the measure passed.

But as Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster points out in a report to clients Wednesday, Apple did clear up one nagging ambiguity: does the company's oft-stated goal of selling 10 million iPhones in 2008 mean that it hopes to sell 10 million phones within this calender year, or 10 million phones between June 29, 2007 and Dec. 31, 2008? It's a question often argued in heated words in the comment threads of Apple blogs (including this one). "We confirmed with Apple," writes Munster, "that the goal is to sell 10m iPhones 'in CY08' alone."

Munster goes on to say that, according to his models, Apple will easily beat that target. "We are currently modeling for 12.9m iPhones in CY08," he writes. "Exceeding the goal by 2.9m units or 29%."

To do that, Apple will have to expand the market for iPhones in Europe and Asia, something it has said it plans to do this year. COO Tim Cook was asked specifically about the huge mobile phone markets in China and India, where traffic in unlocked iPhones is reported to be heavy. "We will one day enter China," he said. "We're not saying when, and we will one day enter India."

For a particularly detailed account of the meeting, see AppleInsider here.