Hard on the heels of a 75% price cut in Germany and 100 pounds (37%) off in the U.K. comes a report out of Paris that two high-level executives at Orange, the iPhone’s wireless carrier in France, have flown to Cupertino to figure out what to do about the excess inventory piling up on their shelves.

Under a headline that reads “L’échec de l’iPhone pousse Orange et Apple à renégocier” (”The iPhone’s failure forces Orange and Apple to renegotiate”), Les Echos reports that Orange executive director Louis-Pierre Wenes and marketing director Alice Holzman met with Apple COO Tim Cook earlier this week to hammer out a deal that could lead to a French price cut in the next few weeks.

The sticking point in the negotiations, according to Les Echos: Apple wants Orange to subsidize the cost of the device, as it does all its other models; Orange wants Apple, in return, to sharply reduce or drop entirely the cut it demands of each sale.

The meeting was the latest attempt to sort out the trans-Atlantic inventory imbalance has developed in advance of the second-generation iPhone (or iPhones), now widely expected to arrive in June. While the first-generation continues to sell briskly in the U.S. and has been in short supply in Apple stores for several weeks, European sales are reported to have slowed significantly in advance of the so-called 3G model.

On Friday, the London Times quoted Kathryn Huberty, an Apple (AAPL) specialist at Morgan Stanley, saying that the European carriers had become over-excited by iPhone hype last June, ordered too many, and are now facing “significant” losses on unsold stock.

Apple sold 3.71 million iPhones in the U.S. last year. According to Strategic Analytics, its European partners sold 350,000 through December, considerably less than the 500,000 to 600,000 they had hoped to sell, and only 300,000 in the first quarter of 2008.

Why Apple can’t just re-balance its inventory by redirecting Europe’s unsold iPhones to Apple stores in the U.S. that could use them is a mystery that has even Apple analysts scratching their heads.

“It remains puzzling that iPhone availability has been very scarce in Apple’s US stores, yet seemingly plentiful everywhere else,” Stanford Bernstein’s Toni Sacconaghi wrote earlier this month. “One explanation might be that because iPhone’s supply shortage came at quarter’s end, Apple chose to ship most of its iPhones to the channel, where units would be recognized as sold during the quarter, rather than re-building inventory in its US stores.” (see here)

Is he right? Is Apple manipulating its shipments to dress up its Q2 report? We’ll likely find out on Wednesday, when Apple reports its quarterly earnings and releases numbers on its domestic and overseas iPhone sales.

It’s perhaps a measure of how badly Apple (AAPL) investors needed to hear from someone — anyone — high up at the company, that all it took to move the stock nearly 4% in after-hours trading on Wednesday was for COO Tim Cook to answer a few questions.

The stock had fallen more than 80 points since December and has been getting pummeled in recent weeks by rumors of falling component orders and reports from bearish analysts — chief among them Bernstein Research’s Toni Sacconaghi, who estimated last week that Apple would miss its 2008 target of 10 million iPhones by more than 2 million units. With nobody from Apple stepping up to speak to these issues, the stock had nowhere to go but down.

But yesterday afternoon Cook talked for 45 minutes before at packed house at the Goldman Sachs Technology Investment Symposium, answering the questions that had been piling up — about inventory levels, iPod sales, unlocked iPhones, the timing of price cuts and the growth potential of the Mac.

There wasn’t much news — for the most part, he reiterated the company line — but for investors there was clearly something reassuring about hearing Apple’s strategy laid out clearly, calmly and for the most part without hype. That is to say, by someone other than Steve Jobs.

The main news to come out of the session was Cook’s repeated assurances that Apple is committed to hitting that 10 million iPhone target in 2008 and will do whatever it takes to make it — even if it means offering the iPhone to multiple carriers in some countries and selling unlocked phones. “We’re not married to any business model,” Cook said.

He also described the surprisingly large number of hacked iPhones turning up around the world as a good problem to have. When users are “stepping over each other” to get to a device, it’s a sign of pent-up worldwide demand.

He touched on most of the hot topics, saying among other things …

• There is “huge headroom” in the Macintosh market
• Apple TV is still a “nichey” product but has “enormous opportunity”
• iPod shuffle sales were down 17% globally last Q, thus the price cut
• 40% of iPod sales in U.S. are to new customers; that doesn’t feel like a saturated market to him
• The iPod touch is the beginning of a new mobile platform
• The $200 iPhone price cut last September was in part to grow the user base and attract developers
• No more detail about the SDK until next week to keep “the element of surprise”

Nothing terribly surprising there. But for some investors tuning in to the webcast, what he had to say was less important than how he said it.

“I was just impressed as I could be,” wrote one listener on TMO’s influential Apple Finance Board. “I am always haunted by the vulnerability of Apple’s shareholders like myself if something should happen to Steve Jobs. For the first time, listening yesterday to Tim Cook made me feel confident that in him was a person who could ably step in if Jobs fell off the earth.” (link)

You can hear a replay of the webcast here. For more analysis, got to Techmeme here.